CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
You ask me about the sack of Baghdad? It was so horrible there are no words to describe it. I wish I had died earlier and had not seen how the fools destroyed these treasures of knowledge and learning. I thought I understood the world, but this holocaust is so strange and pointless that I am struck dumb. The revolutions of time and its decisions have defeated all reason and knowledge.
—The Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz describing the sack of Baghdad by Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, 1258 (translation: Michael Wood)
A PULSATING, MINUTE-LONG ROAR of sound brought President George W. Bush’s crusade against “terrorism” to Baghdad. There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defences and then a series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under us, the walls moving, the sound waves clapping against our ears. Tubes of fire tore into the sky around the Iraqi capital, dark red at the base, golden at the top. Looking out across the Tigris from the riverbank, I could see pin-pricks of fire reaching high into the sky as America’s bombs and missiles exploded on to Iraq’s military and communication centres and, no doubt, upon the innocent as well. Valhalla, I said to myself. This needed Wagner, the Twilight of the Gods, Götterdämmerung .
No one in Iraq doubted that the dead would include civilians. Tony Blair had said just that in the House of Commons debate that very same week. But I wondered, listening to this storm of fire across Baghdad, if he had any conception of what it looks like, what it feels like, or of the fear of those innocent Iraqis who were, as I wrote my report an hour later, cowering in their homes and basements. Just before the missiles arrived, I talked to an old Shia Muslim woman in a poor area of Baghdad, dressed in traditional black with a white veil over her head. I pressed her for what she felt. In the end, she just said: “I am afraid.” The explosions now gave expression to her words.
That this was the start of something that would change the face of the Middle East was in little doubt; whether it would be successful in the long term was quite another matter. It was a strange sensation to be on the ground, in at the start of this imperial adventure. The sheer violence of it, the howl of air-raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles, carried its own political message; not just to Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions announced. This is how we do business. This is how we take our revenge for 11 September 2001.
Not even President Bush had made any pretence in the last days of peace to link Iraq with those international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Yet the Americans were—without the permission of the United Nations, with most of the world against them—acting out their rage with a fiery consummation. Iraq, of course, could not withstand this for long. Saddam might claim, as he did, that his soldiers could defeat technology with courage. Nonsense. What fell upon Iraq on 19 March—and I witnessed in Baghdad just an infinitesimally small part of this festival of violence—was as militarily overwhelming as it was politically terrifying. The crowds outside my hotel stood and stared into the sky at the flashing anti-aircraft bursts, awed by their power. Did the British, I wondered as I later stood on my hotel balcony near the Tigris, know where this will lead? Did we British not walk down this same arrogant path against the petty tyrants of Mesopotamia almost a hundred years ago? And look what happened to the British empire. Now, listening to those great explosions around Baghdad, I wondered what time had in store for the American empire.
Baghdad had always been a harsh place for me. Over the years, I had made many friends in the city—businessmen and their families, artists, retainers from the old regime, and, yes, Baathists and their families and at least one minister, Naji al-Hadithi, first the information minister then the foreign minister, a man whose first response to pointed questions would be to look at the ceiling of his office. Up there, he would be telling us. Up there, in the ceiling, was the microphone. But in the homes of Iraqis, I felt safe. Old photographs would show grandfathers in British army uniform, young women shopping at Harrods in the 1950s and—much later—the same women, middle-aged, enjoying the oil wealth of Saddam’s Iraq, walking in Knightsbridge in the late 1970s and 1980s. But the insufferable heat of Baghdad in summer and the constant “minders” whom the information ministry would attach to reporters on the most innocent of stories would have a claustrophobic effect. After a while the minders took our money and worked for us rather than the regime. We could “buy” them, and during this last Saddamite war they would move imperceptibly from being servants of the regime to servants of the television networks. In the weeks following the “liberation” of Baghdad, they would become our employees, and a few months later we would find them working as employees of the U.S. occupying power.
When we could shake off the minders, persuade them we were only taking a taxi to the grocery store when in fact we were heading to the slums of Saddam City, we could hear the men of the Shiite opposition, the rage of the Dawa party, the courageous voices of families who lived amid filth, who rose up at our bidding in 1991 and were betrayed but who still waited for their moment of freedom. The senior ministry men knew we were making these illicit visits, but for $100 or $200 they would disregard them. The regime was as corrupting as it was corrupt. Standing on the world’s greatest wealth, it had given its people war and more war and yet more war. I had been in Baghdad as the Iranian Scud missiles had crashed into the nighttime city, on the front lines in the assault on Khorramshahr in 1980; I had seen the Iraqi dead inside Iran in 1982 and inside Kuwait in 1991; and now I would see the Iraqi dead again. Inside my brain was a memories box in which I would see as many Iraqis dead as alive, their bodies as vivid as the living.
And it dawned on me over a long period that Iraqis must have seen themselves this way. They were both dead and alive. War had become not just part of their lives, but the very fabric of their existence. To fight and die—for Saddam, for Iraq, for Arab nationalism, for patriotism, out of fear—was a natural phenomenon. Between 1980 and 1988 they fought the Iranians to prevent the occupation of their country. Occupation, for Iraqis, for Arabs—for anyone of any race or religion— was not just humiliation. It was a form of rape. The enemy came into your country, your city, your street, your home, your bedroom. They would tie you up, insult your family, torture you, kill you. Saddam’s own secret policemen did that. They, too, were occupiers. Woe betide anyone who tried to take their place.
The night before the first raids, I had walked around the Jadriya suburb of Baghdad, mixed Sunni–Shia middle class, watching soldiers with their children on their shoulders, hugging their wives goodbye, kitbags over their shoulders, rifles in hand. Snapshot. Paris and Berlin and London 1914. Berlin 1939. Warsaw 1939. London 1939. The Soviet Union 1941. The United States 1941. And before Korea and during Vietnam and among all the armies of the world as they set off on their wars to defend or promote civilisation or fascism or communism. Second Lieutenant Bill Fisk, perhaps, in Birkenhead, 1918? And now. I called at a pharmacy to buy bandages and plaster and lavatory paper. The chemist was a thoughtful man, explaining to the other glowering customers that the foreign journalist was going to share their dangers, that they should treat him with kindness. I told the man that he was especially generous since I thought my own air force, the RAF, would soon be bombing Baghdad. “Yes,” he said with a sad smile, “I rather think they will.”
So at the start of this new and one-sided war, we reporters would be recording two different conflicts: the suffering of Iraqis and the death throes of the regime. The latter wanted us to view the two as identical. The Americans and British insisted that they were destroying the regime in order to end the suffering. In fact, the suffering and the dying struggle of Iraqi Baathism could no more be separated than you could tear the bandages off a wound without causing the patient to shriek in pain. It was easy to argue that Saddam’s wickedness was the cause of all their woes, but wounded and dying Iraqis did not see their fate in quite those terms. They were being attacked by Americans, not by Iraqis. American missiles and bombs were destroying their homes. Had they fought and died on the Iran front, only to be attacked and occupied by another foreign power? The Pentagon clearly understood this equation. Why else would the American military refuse to do what any professional army—or occupying power—would do: to count the number of civilian deaths during and after the war?
Donald Rumsfeld was to assert that the American attack on Baghdad was “as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed.” But he could not have told that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looks at me on the first morning of the war, drip-feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tries vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her legs—they were bound up with gauze—and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. Her mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg, which the little girl thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha’s mother thinks that if her child’s two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from her paralysis. She was the first of the patients brought to the Mustansariya University Hospital after America’s blitz on the city began.
There is something sick, obscene, about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we reporters turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi minister of health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to emphasise the “bestial” nature of the American attack. The Americans say that they don’t intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain. So let’s forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the cocky moralising of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip—this bright morning in March 2003—around the Mustansariya College Hospital. For the reality of war—and here I unashamedly make my point again—is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about “coalition forces” which our “embedded” journalists were already telling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy—which this war does not—is primarily about suffering and death.
Take fifty-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs, but who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders—they are now twice their original size. She was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missiles struck Baghdad. “I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere,” she told me. “It was on my arms, my legs, my chest.” Amel Hassan still has multiple shrapnel wounds in her chest. Her five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt’s front door when the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding, although the blood has clotted around her toes and is stanched by the bandages on her ankles and lower legs. Two boys are in the next room. Saad Selim is eleven, his brother Omar fourteen. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest.
Isra Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel wounds to the legs, sustained when she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the blitz began. Imam Ali is twenty-three and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover her head with a black scarf but she cannot hide the purple wounds to her legs. Multiple shrapnel wounds. After a while, “multiple shrapnel wounds” sounds like a natural disease, which I suppose—among a people who have suffered more than twenty years of war—it is.
So was all this, I asked myself, for 11 September 2001? All this was to “strike back” at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali had nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than had the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wondered, that these children, these young women, should suffer for September 11th? Wars repeat themselves. Always, when “we” come to visit those we have bombed, we have the same question. In Libya in 1986, American reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991, “we” asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And now a doctor found himself asked by a British radio reporter—yes, you’ve guessed it—“Do you think, Doctor, that some of these people could have been hit by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire?”
Should we laugh or cry at this? Must we always blame “them” for their own wounds? Certainly we should ask why those cruise missiles exploded where they did, at least 320 in Baghdad alone, courtesy of the USS Kitty Hawk. Isra Riad came from Sayadiyeh, where there is a big military barracks. Najla Abbas’s home was in Risalleh, where there were villas belonging to Saddam’s family. The two Selim brothers lived in Shirta Khamse, where there was a storehouse for military vehicles. But that’s the whole problem. Targets are scattered across the city. The poor—and all the wounded I saw were poor—live in cheap, sometimes wooden houses that collapse under blast damage.
It’s the same old story. If we make war, we are going to kill and maim the innocent. Dr. Habib al-Hezai, whose FRCS was gained at Edinburgh University, counted 101 patients of the total 207 wounded in the raids in his hospital alone, of whom 85 were civilians—20 of them women and 6 of them children—and 16 soldiers. A young man and a child of twelve died under surgery. No one will say how many soldiers were killed during the attacks.
Driving across Baghdad was an eerie experience. The targets were indeed carefully selected, even though their destruction inevitably struck the innocent. There was a presidential palace with four 10-metres-high statues of the Arab warrior Saladin on each corner—the face of each, of course, was Saddam’s—and, neatly in between, a great black hole gouged into the façade of the building. The Ministry of Air Weapons Production was pulverised, a massive heap of prestressed concrete and rubble. But outside, at the gate, there were two sandbag emplacements with smartly dressed Iraqi soldiers, rifles over the parapet, ready to defend their ministry from the enemy which had already destroyed it.
The morning traffic built up on the roads beside the Tigris. No driver looked too hard at the Republican Palace on the other side of the river or the Ministry of Armaments Procurement beside it. They burned for twelve hours after the first missile strikes. It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life. But then again, no one under Saddam’s regime would spend too long looking at such things, would they? Iraqis were puzzled as to what all this meant. In 1991, the Americans struck the refineries, the electricity grid, the water pipes, communications. But on day two of this war, Baghdad could still function. The land-line telephones worked, the Internet operated, the electrical power was at full capacity, the bridges over the Tigris remained unbombed. My guess was that when—“if ” was still a sensitive phrase— the Americans arrived in Baghdad, they would need a working communications system, electricity, transport. What had been spared was not a gift to the Iraqi people, I concluded; it was for the benefit of Iraq’s supposed new masters. How wrong I was.
The Iraq Daily emerged with an edition of just four pages, a clutch of articles on the “steadfastness” of the nation—steadfastness in Arabic is soummoud, the same name as the missiles Iraq partially destroyed before Bush forced the UN inspectors to leave by going to war—and a headline that read: “President: Victory Will Come in Iraqi Hands.” During the bombing on Friday night, Iraqi television— again, there had been no attempt by the United States to destroy the television facilities—showed an Iraqi general, appearing live, to reassure the nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile explosions blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television camera.
So where did all this lead us? In the early hours next day, I looked once more across the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the colonnaded ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and the sky was lowering with smoke. The buttressed, rampart-like palace—sheets of flame soaring from its walls—looked like a medieval castle ablaze; Ctesiphon destroyed, Mesopotamia at the moment of its destruction, as it had been seen so many times, over so many thousands of years. Xenophon struck south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. The caliphs came. And then the Ottomans and then the British. All departed. Now come the Americans. It was not about legitimacy. It was about something much more seductive, something Saddam himself understood all too well, a special kind of power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq wished to demonstrate as he smashed his way across this ancient civilisation.
That second afternoon, the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around Baghdad in the hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 6:20 p.m. on 22 March, when Saddam’s biggest military office block, a great rampart of a building twenty storeys high beside his palace, simply exploded in front of me, a cauldron of fire, a 100-foot sheet of flame and a sound that had my ears singing for an hour afterwards. The entire buttressed edifice shuddered under the impact. Then four more cruise missiles came in. It was the heaviest bombing Baghdad had suffered in more than twenty years of war. To my right, a long colonnaded building looking much like the façade of the Pentagon coughed fire as five missiles crashed into the concrete. In an operation officially intended to create “shock and awe”— Rumsfeld’s latest slogan—shock was hardly the word for it. The few Iraqis in the streets around me—no friends of Saddam, I would suspect—cursed under their breath.
From high-rise buildings, shops and homes came the thunder of crashing glass as the shock waves swept across the Tigris in both directions. Minute after minute the missiles came in. Many Iraqis had watched—as I had—the television tape of those ominous B-52 bombers taking off from Britain only six hours earlier. Like me, they had noted the time, added three hours for Iraqi time ahead of London and guessed that, at around 9 p.m., the terror would begin. The B-52s, almost certainly firing from outside Iraqi airspace, were dead on time. Policemen drove at speed through the streets, their loudspeakers ordering pedestrians to take shelter or hide under cover of tall buildings. Much good did it do. Crouching next to a block of shops, I narrowly missed the shower of glass that came cascading down from the upper windows as the shock waves slammed into them.
A few Iraqis—husbands and wives, older children—could be seen staring from balconies, shards of broken glass around them. Each time one of the great golden bubbles of fire burst across the city, they ducked inside before the blast wave reached them. As I stood beneath the trees on the corniche, a wave of cruise missiles passed low overhead, the shriek of their passage almost as devastating as the explosions that were to follow. How, I asked myself, does one describe this outside the language of a military report, the definition of the colour, the decibels of the explosions? The flight of the missiles sounded as if someone was ripping to pieces huge canopies of silk across the sky.
There is something anarchic about all human beings, about their reaction to violence. The Iraqis around me stood and watched, as I did, the tongues of flame bursting from the upper stories of the building beside Saddam’s palace, reaching high into the sky. Strangely, the electricity grid continued to operate and around us the traffic lights continued to move between red and green. Billboards moved in the breeze of the shock waves; floodlights continued to blaze on public buildings. Above us, curtains of smoke were moving over Baghdad, white from the explosions, black from the burning targets. How could one resist this? How could the Iraqis ever believe—with their broken technology, their debilitating twelve years of sanctions—that they could defeat the computers of these missiles and of these aircraft? It was the same old story: irresistible, unquestionable power.
Well, yes, we said to ourselves, could one attack a more appropriate regime? But that was not the point. For the message of this new raid was the same as that of the previous night’s raid, and of all the raids in the hours to come: the United States must be obeyed; the EU, UN, NATO—nothing must stand in its way. Many Iraqis were already asking me: How many days? Not because they wanted the Americans or the British in Baghdad, but because they wanted this violence to end: which, when you think of it, is exactly why these raids took place.
It is the morning of 25 March 2003. Let us now praise famous men. Saddam Hussein is doing just that. Today he proceeds to list the Iraqi army and navy officers who are leading the “resistance” against the Anglo–American army in Um Qasr, Basra and Nasiriyah. Major-General Mustafa Mahmoud Umran, commanding officer of the 11th Division, Brigadier Bashir Ahmed Othman, commander of the Iraqi 45th Brigade, Brigadier-Colonel Ali Khalil Ibrahim, commander of the 11th Battalion of the 45th Brigade, Colonel Mohamed Khallaf al-Jabawi, commander of the 45th Brigade’s 2nd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Fathi Rani Majid of the Iraqi army’s III Corps . . . And so it goes on. “Be patient,” Saddam keeps saying. Be patient. Fourteen times in all, he tells the army and the people of Iraq to be patient. “We will win . . . we will be victorious against Evil.” Patient but confident in victory. Fighting Evil.
Wasn’t that how President Bush was encouraging his people a few hours earlier? At other times, Saddam sounds like his hero, Josef Stalin. “They have come to destroy our country and we must stand and destroy them and defend our people and our country . . . Cut their throats . . . They are coming to take our land. But when they try to enter our cities, they try to avoid a battle with our forces and to stay outside the range of our weapons.” Was this modelled on the Great Patriotic War, the defence of Mother Russia under Uncle Joe? And if not, how to account for those hundreds of Iraqi soldiers still holding out under American air and tank attacks? People, party, patriotism. The three Ps run like a theme through the Saddam speech, along with a bitter warning: as the American and British forces make less headway on the ground, Saddam says, they will use their air power against Iraq ever more brutally. So what does it feel like to live these days in President Saddam’s future Stalingrad?
A few hours later, the cruise missiles and the planes came back. The great explosions blanketed Baghdad in the darkness. One of the Tomahawks smashed into the grounds of the Mustansariya University—twenty-five students wounded and one dead, so they claimed. There were other sounds in the early hours. A blaze of automatic gunfire on the Tigris corniche—attempts to capture two escaping U.S. airmen, the authorities insisted—and then a full-scale gun battle not far from the city centre at 2:30 a.m. There were rumours. Armed men had come from Saddam City, the Shia slums on the edge of Baghdad, and had been intercepted by state security men. No “independent confirmation.” A story that the railway line north of Baghdad has been cut. Denied.
On Sunday, the Iraqi minister of defence, General Sultan Hashem, gave a remarkable briefing on the war, naming the units involved in front-line fighting— the 3rd Battalion of the Iraqi army’s 27th Brigade was still holding out at Suq ash-Shuyukh south of Nasiriyah, the 3rd Battalion of the Third Iraqi Army was holding Basra. And I remembered how these generals gave identical briefings during the 1980–88 war against Iran. When we checked on their stories back then, they almost always turned out to be true. Did the same apply today? General Hashem insisted that his men were destroying U.S. tanks and armour and helicopters. This was easy to dismiss—until videotape of two burning U.S. armoured personnel carriers popped up on the television screen. Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan had been obliging enough to explain the Iraqi army’s tactics. It was Iraqi policy to let the Anglo–American armies “roam around” in the desert as long as they wanted, and to attack them when they tried to enter the cities. Which seemed to be pretty much what they were doing.
From Baghdad, with its canopy of sinister black oil smoke and air-raid sirens, the American plan appeared to be rather similar: to barnstorm up the desert parallel to the Tigris and Euphrates valley and try to turn right at every available city on the way. If there’s trouble at Um Qasr, try Basra. If Basra is blocked, have a go through Nasiriyah. If that’s dangerous, try to turn right through Najaf. But the open road—the long highway to Baghdad lined with adoring Iraqis throwing roses at GIs and Tommys—was proving to be an illusion.201 Yet we could not travel. No Western journalist—even with permission to take a street taxi—could leave the Baghdad city limits. On 27 March, I went to see my old friends at the Al-Jazeera channel whose local offices stood on the west bank of the Tigris. They had a crew in Basra which was under British ground and air attack. I begged them to show me the roughcuts of the videotape they had received from Basra. If I could not go there, I could at least look through the lens of their cameraman before the Iraqis— or, after transmission, the Americans and the British—got their hands on it.
I sit in their editing studio, the sound of anti-aircraft guns pummelling away outside the walls. The video-camera is hand-held, unsteady, the cameraman nervous. Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, an Iraqi girl—victim of an Anglo–American air strike—is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a dreadfully wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress. An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq’s second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited Al-Jazeera tape—filmed over the past thirty-six hours and newly arrived in Baghdad—is raw, painful, devastating.
It is also proof that Basra—reportedly “captured” and “secured” by British troops—is still under the control of Saddam Hussein’s forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out there, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck. A remarkable part of the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the explosion of incoming—presumably British—shells.
The short sequence of the dead British soldiers—for the public showing of which Tony Blair was to express such horror a day later—was little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past twelve years, pictures that never drew any expressions of condemnation from the British prime minister. The two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and abdomen. Another sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra civilians and armed men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers’ British army jeep—registration number HP5AA—and dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can be seen kicking the overturned Ministry of Defence trailer, registration number 91KC98, which the jeep was towing when it was presumably ambushed. Also to be observed on the unedited tape is an RAF pilotless drone photo-reconnaissance aircraft, its red-and-blue roundels visible on one wing, shot down and lying overturned on a roadway. Marked “ARMY” in capital letters, it carries the code sign ZJ300 on its tail and is attached to a large cylindrical pod that probably contains the plane’s camera.
Far more harrowing than the pictures of the dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra’s largest hospital as victims of the bombardment are brought to the operating rooms, shrieking in pain. A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl’s guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a trail of blood leads from the impact of an incoming—presumably British—shell. Next to the crater is a pair of plastic slippers.
The Al-Jazeera tapes—most of which will never be seen—are the first vivid proof that Basra remains totally outside British control. Not only is one of the city’s main roads to Baghdad still open—this is how the tapes reached the Iraqi capital—but Iraqi General Khaled Hatem is interviewed in a Basra street, surrounded by hundreds of his uniformed and armed troops, telling Al-Jazeera’s reporter that his men will “never” surrender to Iraq’s enemies. Armed Baath party militiamen can also be seen in the streets, where traffic cops are directing lorries and buses near the city’s Sheraton Hotel.
Mohamed al-Abdullah, Al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Basra, must be the bravest journalist in Iraq right now. In the sequence of three tapes, he can be seen interviewing families under fire and calmly reporting the incoming British artillery bombardments. One tape shows that the Sheraton Hotel on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab has sustained shell damage. On the edge of the river—beside one of the huge statues of Iraq’s 1980–88 war “martyrs,” each pointing an accusing finger across the waterway towards Iran—Basra residents can be seen filling jerrycans from the sewage-polluted river.
On 22 March the Iraqi government said that 30 civilians had been killed in Basra and another 63 wounded. On 27 March it claimed that more than 4,000 civilians had been wounded in Iraq since the war began and more than 350 killed. But Mr. al-Abdullah’s tape shows at least seven more bodies brought to the Basra hospital mortuary over the past thirty-six hours. (One of them, his head still gushing blood onto the mortuary floor, was identified as an Arab correspondent for a Western news agency.) Other grisly scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another girl lies on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child has its feet blown away. There is no indication whether American or British ordnance killed these children. The tapes give no indication of Iraqi military casualties.
But at a time when the Iraqi authorities will not allow Western reporters to visit Basra, this is the nearest to independent evidence we have of continued fighting in the city and the cost of resisting the British army. For days, the Iraqis have been denying optimistic reports from “embedded” reporters—especially from the BBC—who give the impression that Basra is “secured” or otherwise effectively under British control. This the tapes conclusively prove to be untrue. There is also a sequence showing two men, both black, who are claimed by Iraqi troops to be U.S. prisoners-of-war. No questions are asked of the men, who are dressed in identical black shirts and jackets. Both appear on the tape nervous and looking at the camera crew and at the Iraqi troops who are crowded behind them.
The dead civilians, however, will soon be erased from the story of war. They are among the statistics that will be for ever kept from us. They will become unknown, the undead, the “collateral damage” that will simply not end up in the Pentagon or British Ministry of Defence archives—or at least, not in any file that the public will be allowed to see. Thus the little girl will not have lost her head. Her companion will not have lost her brain. The third child’s feet will remain firmly attached to her body. At least for the historical record—for there will be no historical record. That is part of our new war.
On 28 March we realised that the Americans—perhaps because they were not advancing as fast as they planned—did not want to keep Baghdad’s communications intact. It was difficult to weep over a telephone exchange. True, the destruction of the local phone system in Baghdad was a miserable experience for tens of thousands of Iraqi families who wanted to keep in contact with their relatives during the long dark hours of bombing. But the shattered exchanges and umbilical wires and broken concrete of the Mimoun International Communications Centre scarcely equalled the exposed bones and intestines and torn flesh of the civilian wounded of Iraq. “Command and control centres” is how the CENTCOM boys described the targets they zapped in the early hours of the 28th. It represents another of those little degradations that we—as in “we, the West”—routinely undertake when things aren’t going our way in a war. Back in “our” 1991 blitz on Baghdad, we started off on the presidential palaces and barracks, then moved on to communications, then electricity and then water treatment plants. In Serbia in 1999, it was the same story. First went the Yugoslav army barracks and arms factories, then the road bridges, phone system, the electricity. Now the same old story has begun in Baghdad. The presidential palaces and barracks have been hit. Time to smash the phones once again.
Obviously, “we” hoped it wouldn’t come to this. The Anglo–American armies wanted to maintain the infrastructure of Baghdad for themselves—after they had “liberated” the city under a hail of roses from its rejoicing people—because they would need working phone lines on their arrival. But after a night of massive explosions across the city, communications had been sacrificed. The huge Rashid telecommunications centre—destroyed in the 1991 bombardment—was struck by a cruise missile that penetrated the basement of the building. The exchange in Karada—where Baghdadis pay their phone bills—was ripped open.
Outside each of these blocks—as outside every government institution here— can be found a giant billboard of Saddam, doing whatever is appropriate to the relevant ministry or department. In front of Baghdad Central Station, for example, a Saddam in a felt hat is acting as signalman to speed an express on its way to Basra—services to the city, by the way, are now officially “suspended” because of the British military siege. At the Mimoun exchange, Saddam is standing in front of the telecommunications mast. At the Rashid offices, he is talking on an old-fashioned Bakelite black telephone while taking notes on a pad with a large brown biro.
No more. Because “we” have decided to destroy the phones and all those “command and control” systems that may be included, dual use, into the network. So now most Baghdadis have to drive across town to get news of each other; there is more traffic on the roads than at any time since the start of the war. Down, too, went Baghdad’s Internet system. Iraqi television, whose studios were bombed by the Americans on 26 March, can only be watched between a growing number of power cuts.
So what’s next? Electricity or water? Or, since power runs the water pumps, both? Each day brings news of events which—on their own—have no great import but which together add a grim new dimension to the invasion and its aftermath. At the end of March, hundreds of tribesmen from across Iraq met at the Baghdad Hotel before meeting Saddam. The Iraqi tribes—ignored by the military planners and Washington pundits who think that Iraq is held together only by the Baath party and the army—are a powerful force, their unity cemented by marriage and a network of families who provide a force as cohesive as the Baath party itself. Tribesmen guard the grain silos and some of the electricity generating stations around Baghdad. Two of them were credited with disabling an Apache helicopter captured a week earlier. And now tribal leaders arrived from all over Iraq, from Fallujah and Ramadi and Nineveh and Babylon and Basra and Nasiriyah and all the cities of Mesopotamia. So much for Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon’s contention that Saddam has “lost control” of southern Iraq. They will return today and tomorrow to their cities and villages with instructions on how to oppose the American and British armies. Saddam has already issued one set of orders that tells the tribesmen “to fight [the Americans and British] in groups and attack their advance and rear lines to block the way of their progress . . . If the enemy settles into a position, start to harass them at night . . .”
I am puzzled about this. Guerrilla forces may harass an occupying army but will do little harm during an invasion when the overwhelming firepower and movement of the invaders can suppress any opposition. Only when the occupying soldiers settle into barracks and routine patrols do they become vulnerable. So is Saddam giving these tribesmen their marching orders for the war—or their instructions for the postwar occupation? Could it be that Saddam is confronting the possibility of military defeat in the field? Is there a future insurrection being planned here in Baghdad as the Americans storm up the road towards Nasiriyah?
On the tenth floor of the Palestine Hotel where I live amid the cell-like rooms of more than a hundred other journalists, I have squirrelled away a library of books to read in the long, loud nights. William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and J. F. C. Fuller’s The Second World War, to remind me of what real war is like, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace to recall for me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror—I can heartily recommend the Battle of Borodino to anyone—and some volumes of poetry and a big, disorderly pile of newspaper and magazine articles which I tore from my Beirut archives before leaving for Amman and Baghdad. Tonight, I pull out a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written well over five months earlier, and almost without thinking, I pull my pen from my pocket and start scribbling harsh lines in the margin of this prophetic article:
If Providence does not intrude, we will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the “On to Berlin!” bravado with which French poilus and British Tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cake-walk neoconservatives predict . . . To destroy Saddam’s weapons, to democratise, defend and hold Iraq together, U.S. troops will be tied down for decades. Yet, terrorist attacks in liberated Iraq seem as certain as in liberated Afghanistan. For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world. With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon . . . We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
IT WAS AN OUTRAGE, AN OBSCENITY. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three children in their still-smouldering car. Two missiles from an American jet killed them all—twenty-one Iraqi civilians—torn to pieces on 27 March before they could be “liberated” by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself at the scene, to call this “collateral damage”? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red-and-yellow dust and rain that morning.
It was a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs. Bush and Blair still fondly hoped would rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. “Roar, flash,” he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them. I am faced by the same old question: How to record so terrible an event? Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told. For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?
Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch for customers at the Nasser restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb Street. The missile that killed them landed next to the westbound carriageway, its blast tearing away the front of the café and cutting the two men—the first forty-eight, the second only eighteen— to pieces. A fellow worker led me through the rubble. “This is all that is left of them now,” he said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with blood. At least fifteen cars burst into flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the centre of the street that had been flipped upside down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The second missile hit on the eastbound carriageway, sending shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block with the words “This is God’s possession” written in marble on the outside wall.
The building’s manager, Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway as soon as he heard the massive explosion. “I found Ta’ar in pieces over there,” he told me. His head was blown off. “That’s his hand.” A group of young men and a woman took me into the street and there, a scene from any horror film, was Ta’ar’s hand, cut off at the wrist, his four fingers and thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His colleague, Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled a few feet away, a pale red-and-grey mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked for Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.
As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities. There was the electrical shop owner killed behind his counter by the same missile that cut down Ta’ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl standing on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the truck-driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar who regularly called to see Mr. Danoon for bread and who was just leaving when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to destroy him.
In Qatar, the Anglo-American forces announced an inquiry. The Iraqi government, who are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value of such a bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially put at fourteen dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there was a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though I couldn’t find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade headquarters, but the fire brigade can hardly be described as a military target. Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions; these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.
Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned coordinates, and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud’s friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn’t want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems. And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in Baghdad. On 24 March an entire family of nine was wiped out in their home near the centre of the city. On 25 March a busload of civilian passengers was reportedly killed on a road south of Baghdad. On the 26th, Iraqis were learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered on a Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the Iraqi border.
We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died because of September 11th, we may say, because of the “weapons of mass destruction”—which do not exist—because of our desperate desire to “liberate” all these people. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I wrote that night, I’ll bet we are told that Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan’t mention the pilot, of course. And we didn’t. Faulty Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles—the same old excuse—had probably killed them all, the Americans said. It was not possible. The two missiles had exploded equidistant from each other on both carriageways. No guidance system could fail on two anti-aircraft missiles at exactly the same time, causing them to land so neatly on the same road.
There is no end to this. Just a day later—on 28 March—the atrocity is repeated. The evidence this time is a piece of metal only a foot high, but the numbers on it hold the clue. At least sixty-two civilians have died by the afternoon of 29 March and the coding on that hunk of metal contains the identity of the culprit. The Americans and British were doing their best to suggest—here we go again— that yet one more Iraqi anti-aircraft missile destroyed those dozens of lives, adding that they were “still investigating” the carnage. But the coding on the missile fragment is in groups of numerals and Latin letters, not in Arabic. And many of the survivors heard the plane.
In the al-Noor hospital, there were appalling scenes of pain and suffering. A two-year-old girl, Saida Jaffar, swaddled in bandages and tubes, a tube into her nose, another into her stomach. All I could see of her was her forehead, two small eyes and a chin. Beside her, blood and flies covered a heap of old bandages and swabs. Not far away, lying on a dirty bed, was three-year-old Mohamed Amaid, his face, stomach, hands and feet all tied tightly in bandages. A great black mass of congealed blood lay at the bottom of his bed.
This is a hospital without computers, with only the most primitive of X-ray machines. But the missile was guided by computers and that vital shard of fuselage was computer-coded. It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans—if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB7492. The letter “B” is scratched and could be an “H.” This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon’s “Lot” number. It reads: MFR 95214 09. The piece of metal bearing the codings was retrieved minutes after the missile exploded on the evening of the 28th, by an old man whose home is only a hundred metres away from the 2-metre crater. Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists. The missile sprayed hunks of metal through the crowds—mainly women and children—and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads. Three brothers, the eldest twenty-one and the youngest twelve, were cut down inside the living room of their brick hut on the main road opposite the market. Two doors away, two sisters were killed in an identical manner.
“We have never seen anything like these wounds before,” Dr. Ahmed, an anaesthetist at the al-Noor hospital, told me later. “These people have been punctured by dozens of bits of metal.” He was right. One old man I visited in a hospital ward had twenty-four holes in the back of his legs and buttocks, some as big as pound coins. An X-ray photograph handed to me by one of his doctors clearly showed at least thirty-five slivers of metal still embedded in his body.
As with the Abu Taleb Street massacre, Shu’ale is a poor Shia Muslim neighbourhood of single-storey corrugated iron and cement food stores and two-room brick homes. Again, these are the very people whom Messrs. Bush and Blair expected to rise in insurrection against Saddam. But the anger in the slums was directed at the Americans and British, by old women and bereaved fathers and brothers who spoke without hesitation—and without the presence of the ubiquitous government “minders.” “This is a crime,” a woman muttered at me angrily. “Yes, I know they say they are targeting the military. But can you see soldiers here? Can you see missiles?”
The answer has to be in the negative. A few journalists did report seeing a Scud missile on a transporter near the Sha’ab area on Thursday and there were anti-aircraft guns around Shu’ale. I heard an American jet race over the scene of the massacre and just caught sight of a ground-to-air missile that was vainly chasing it, its contrail soaring over the slum houses in the dark blue sky. An anti-aircraft battery—manufactured around 1942—also began firing into the air a few blocks away. But even if the Iraqis do position or move their munitions close to the suburbs, does that justify the Americans firing into those packed civilian neighbourhoods, into areas that they know contain crowded main roads and markets—and during the hours of daylight? The 27 March attack on Abu Taleb Street was carried out on a main road at midday during a sandstorm—when dozens of civilians are bound to be killed, whatever the pilot thought he was aiming at.
“I had five sons and now I have only two—and how do I know that even they will survive?” a bespectacled middle-aged man asked in the bare concrete back room of his home. “One of my boys was hit in the kidneys and heart. His chest was full of shrapnel; it came right through the windows. Now all I can say is that I am sad that I am alive.” A neighbour interrupted to say that he saw the plane with his own eyes. “I saw the side of the aircraft and I noticed it changed course after it fired the missile.”
Plane-spotting has become an all-embracing part of life in Baghdad. I respond in my paper to a reader who thoughtfully asks if I can see with my own eyes the American aircraft over the city; I have to reply that in at least sixty-five raids by aircraft, I have not—despite my tiger-like eyes—actually seen one plane. I hear them, especially at night, but they are flying at supersonic speed; during the day, they are usually above the clouds of black smoke that wash over the city. I have, just once, spotted a cruise missile—the cruise or “Tomahawk” rockets fly at only around 400 mph—and I saw it passing down a boulevard towards the Tigris River. But the grey smoke that shoots out of the city like the fingers of a dead hand is unmistakeable, along with the concussion of sound. And when they can be found, the computer codings on the bomb fragments reveal their own story. As the codes on the Shu’ale missile surely must.
All morning, the Americans were at it again, blasting away at targets on the perimeter of Baghdad—where the outer defences are being dug by Iraqi troops— and in the centre of the city. An air-fired rocket exploded on the roof of the Iraqi Ministry of Information, destroying a clutch of satellite dishes. One office building from which I was watching the bombardment swayed for several seconds during a long raid. Even in the al-Noor hospital, the walls were shaking as the survivors of the market slaughter struggled for survival. Hussein Mnati is fifty-two and just stared at me—his face pitted with metal fragments—as bombs blasted the city. A twenty-year-old man was sitting up in the next bed, the blood-soaked stump of his left arm plastered over with bandages. Only twelve hours ago, he had a left arm, a left hand, fingers. Now he blankly recorded his memories. “I was in the market and I didn’t feel anything,” he told me. “The rocket came and I was to the right of it and then an ambulance took me to hospital.” Whether or not his amputation was dulled by pain-killers, he wanted to talk. When I asked him his name, he sat upright in bed and shouted at me: “My name is Saddam Hussein Jassem.”
AT THE END OF MARCH 2003, Sergeant Ali Jaffar Moussa Hamadi al-Nomani drove a car laden with explosives into a U.S. Marine checkpoint in southern Iraq and blew himself up. He was the first Iraqi combatant known to stage a suicide attack. During the uprising against British rule not one Iraqi killed himself like this to destroy his enemies. Nomani was also a Shia Muslim—a member of the sect the Americans faithfully believed to be their secret ally in their invasion of Iraq. Even the Iraqi government initially wondered how to deal with his extraordinary action, caught between its desire to dissociate itself from an event that might remind the world of Osama bin Laden, and its determination to threaten the Americans with more such attacks.
The details of the fifty-year-old sergeant’s life were few but intriguing. He was a soldier in the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War and volunteered to fight in the 1991 Gulf War, the “Mother of All Battles” according to Saddam Hussein. Then, though he was over-age for further fighting, Nomani volunteered to fight the Anglo– American invasion. And so it was, without telling his commander and in his own car, that he drove into a U.S. Marine checkpoint outside Najaf. Saddam awarded him the Military Medal (1st Class) and the “Mother of All Battles” medal. The dead man left five children, a widow and a new place in the 2,000-year history of Iraqi resistance to invasions. A U.S. spokesman said that the attack “looks and feels like terrorism,” although, since Nomani was attacking an occupation army and his target was a military one, no Arab would ever believe this.
Within hours al-Homani’s death, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Iraqi vice president, was talking like a Palestinian or Hizballah leader, emphasising the inequality of arms between the Iraqis and the Americans. “The U.S. administration is going to turn the whole world into people prepared to die for their nations,” he said. “All they can do now is turn themselves into bombs. If the B-52 bombs can now kill 500 or more in our war, then I’m sure that some operations by our freedom fighters will be able to kill 5,000.” It was clear what this meant; the Iraqi leadership was just as surprised at Nomani’s attack as were his American victims.
This made no sense to us. Iraqis were not suiciders. As the Americans might say, this did not “compute.” I wrote a half-hearted dispatch to The Independent on 30 March, trying to make sense of what had happened. Of course, I had forgotten the Iran–Iraq War—the conflict in which Nomani had participated—and the suicidal battles in which the Iraqis fought and died. Suicide bombers, I wrote:
whether they be the Shia Muslim Lebanese successfully evicting Israel’s army of occupation or the Palestinians destroying Israel’s sense of security, are the ultimate weapon of the Arabs. The U.S. first understood its power when suicide bombers struck the American embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the marine barracks in Beirut on 23 October the same year, when 241 American servicemen died. Only when Arabs bent on a far more devastating suicide mission launched their attacks on September 11th, 2001, did Washington finally realise that there was no effective defence against such tactics. In a strange way, therefore, September 11th at last finds a symbolic connection with Iraq. While the attempts to link President Saddam’s regime with Osama bin Laden turned out to be fraudulent, the anger that the U.S. has unleashed is real, and has met the weapon the Americans fear most. Most suicide bombers are younger than Nomani and unmarried. But someone must have helped him to rig the explosives in his car, must have taught him how to set off the detonator. And if this was not the Iraqis, as they claim, then was there an organisation involved of which both the Americans and the Iraqis know nothing?
There was some talk by Vice President Ramadan of “the martyr’s moment of sublimity,” an expression hitherto unheard of in the Baathist lexicon. General Hazim al-Rawi of the Ministry of Defence recalled that the dead man bore the same name as “the Imam Ali” and announced that the new “martyr Ali has opened the door to jihad.” He said that more than 4,000 volunteers from Arab countries were now in the country and that “martyrdom operations will continue not only by Iraqis but by thousands of Arabs who came to Baghdad.” In my report that night, I wrote that “suddenly, it seems, Islam has intruded into this very nationalistic war of liberation—for that is what it is called here—against the Americans.”
In retrospect, Nomani’s suicide was one of the most important moments in this war. It shocked the Americans—whose superficial reaction about “terrorism” hopelessly underplayed the meaning of the attack—and it surprised the Iraqis. But the language of the Baathists—the talk of “martyrdom operations” and the international Arab legion that would supposedly continue them—should have set those old cliché “alarm bells” ringing loud. Something had started outside Najaf, a precedent most serious for any invading army; in a land without any such tradition, a match had been lit.
A vicious dark storm has smashed into Baghdad, leaving my hotel room yellow with sand. The dust and muck of the city now lies like a shroud over the carpets and bed linen and tables. The cleaning staff have long ago fled. My files are covered in fine grains of sand so that the pages slither out of their boxes with the sound of a knife leaving a sheath. I work my way with dirty fingers through the section that I have marked with the word “Islam.” Mostly, the pages are about Shiite resistance. But I have some handwritten notes—never used in a report, since I did not understand their meaning—to the effect that Saddam had, in 2000, allowed the creation of “Islamic committees,” groups of Sunni Muslim religious scholars and their followers who would be permitted to discuss Islamic law and Koranic teaching provided they never mentioned politics, never combined their beliefs with the secular world of the Baath. These committees now existed in Mosul and Baquba, Fallujah and Ramadi, and in Baghdad.
Another sand-engrained page emerged from my file, a single flimsy page from a five-year-old copy of The Economist. “Iraqis, saddened by misfortune, are turning for comfort to their religion,” the report says. “So, in his own manipulative way, is their leader.” Saddam was building in Baghdad the largest mosque in the world, with room for 45,000 worshippers and minarets 600 feet in height. The Iraqi flag now had the words Allahu akbar—God is great—inscribed in the white rectangle between the red and black of the national banner, the eagle of Iraq between the Allahu and theakbar. In 1997 Saddam had given Abdul Monim Abu Zant, a Jordanian calling for an Islamist state in his own country, a weekly half-hour programme on Iraqi television.
“Mosque attendance is rising fast, particularly among the young,” the Economistreporter writes. He quotes a Baghdad resident who says: “Before the [Kuwait] war about 90 men would come to the mosque in my neighbourhood for Friday prayers. Now, more than 1,000 worshippers turn up, mostly young people. There is not enough space, so they pour into the streets.” There had been increased observance during the Ramadan month of fasting. The Economist regarded Saddam’s involvement in this reawakening of Islam as “manipulative” but, listening to the government’s response to the suicide bombing—not to mention the news of Nomani’s “martyrdom”—I began to wonder if Saddam was being compliant rather than manipulative, whether he had discovered a power that would have to be appeased rather than suppressed, one that embraced his own Sunni Muslim people as well as the Shia. Within a week, two women—an even more unheard-of precedent—would blow themselves up at another American checkpoint.
At dusk, the ground around the Baghdad North Gate Cemetery shook with the vibration of the bombs. The oil-grey sky was peppered with anti-aircraft fire. And below the clouds of smoke and the tiny star-like explosion of the shells, Sergeant Frederick William Price of the Royal Garrison Artillery, Corporal A. D. Adsetts of the York and Lancaster Regiment and Aircraftman First Class P. Magee of the Royal Air Force slept on. An eerie place to visit, perhaps, as the first of the night’s raids closed in on the capital of Iraq. Not so. For Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri had spoken earlier of these graves of colonisers past. For No. 1401979 Sergeant Price and No. 4736364 Corporal Adsetts and No. 210493 Aircraftman Magee all died in Britain’s first colonial war in Iraq, in 1921.
And what was it that Mr. Sabri, dressed in his Baath party uniform, said? “British soldiers already have their graveyards in Iraq, from the 1920s and from 1941 . . . Now they will have other graveyards where they will be joined by their friends, the Americans.” Which is why I took a street taxi that very same hour of dusk to the North Gate Cemetery on the old Mosul road from Baghdad to have a look at the men about whom Naji Sabri spoke. Private Nicholson of the York and Lancaster Regiment was only twenty-three when he died on 12 August 1921, Private Clark of the Royal Army Service Corps was thirty-eight when he was killed six days later. This first guerrilla war against Western occupation is now to be refought, according to the Iraqi Baath party. But when? Against this huge invading force? Or afterwards?
“We shall turn our desert into a big graveyard for the American and British soldiers,” Sabri said. As the missiles criss-crossed Baghdad—one swept over the Tigris at only 200 feet above the ground to explode with a roar and a plume of grey smoke in a presidential compound—the temperature of the language rose proportionately. The new colonisers, according to the foreign minister, were using the old British “golden rule” of “divide and conquer”—forget for a moment that “divide et impera” was originally a Roman rule—and he promised they would never break the unity of the Iraqi people. How much of this rhetoric would be abandoned if there was a way out of this war? “Real diplomacy,” the fantastical Sahaf announced, “is to kill them [the Americans and British] on the battlefield so that they feel that their dreams have been foiled. We are not going to allow these dirty lackeys to remain on the land of Iraq.” Lackeys? Didn’t it use to be “lackeys and running dogs” when the Soviet Union existed? Are we really reverting to colonialism? Since the Americans have not reneged on their pledge of occupation and military government, it’s hard to avoid the question. Nor was it difficult to imagine what Aircraftman First Class Magee might think as his grave vibrated to the explosion of bombs from the very same Royal Air Force he long ago died for in Iraq.
It is growing hotter in Baghdad—in every sense of the word—and in a month the temperature will rise to 35 degrees Celsius. The dense black shroud of oil smoke that covers the city is now creating a fog that makes even the mildest of air raids into a thing of mystery. At 4:45 p.m. next day comes the sound of jets yet again, followed by a series of short, sharp explosions that last for up to a minute. They sound all too familiar to my ears: the rumble of cluster bombs—legal against armour but decidedly illegal if used against civilians. I peer for ten minutes through the smoke from a high-rise apartment block, to no avail. Whether the bombs are dropped in the suburbs, on a military barracks or in a built-up area is impossible to discover. Nor is the status of Baghdad in this war. Far from being besieged, its main roads north and south are still open—a few trains are still leaving for northern cities—and although U.S. troops are reported to have set up a checkpoint on the road west to Amman, they appear to have been a “flying column,” stopping trucks and cars for a few hours and then vanishing into the desert at night.
By evening, Vice President Ramadan turns up at the pseudo-Greek villa assigned to government spokesmen beside the Ministry of Information—he has the intriguing habit of never looking at anyone who asks him a question—to insist that 6,000 Arab volunteers have arrived in Iraq to fight the Americans and British, half of them anxious for “martyrdom.” Ramadan repeats yet again that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and spends some time—rather a lot of time, in fact— claiming that the Americans and British might plant such weapons in Iraq in order to fool the world and justify their invasion. And then comes a lecture which, I couldn’t help suspecting, reflected all too faithfully the current anger of Saddam Hussein.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Feisal, was Ramadan’s—and thus Saddam’s—target. “He has offered advice—which is something he is in the habit of doing—and his advice is that he would like to see our leader leave his post . . .” Ramadan thunders. “Let me tell this lackey, this stooge, this small entity—they know full well who his cousin is, the so-called Prince [Ambassador] Bandar in Washington, and who he works for. Let them [the Saudis] say to him: ‘Go to hell. All we wish for is that you do not have an Arab name . . .’ Let me tell you—you are too small, too small, too much of a nothing, to say a word to the leader of Iraq. Those who give up will be swept away from the land of the Arabs.” Which didn’t do a lot for Iraqi–Saudi relations.
Then we in Baghdad hear that Secretary of State Colin Powell is announcing— to the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest Israeli lobby group in the United States, who of course support the invasion—that Syria and Iran are “supporting terror groups” and will have to “face the consequences.” What, we all asked, was happening now? Are we going to forget Baghdad for a few months and wheel our young soldiers west to surround Damascus? George W. Bush now tells us the war may be “long and difficult”—he didn’t tell us that before, did he?—and according to Tony Blair, this is “only the beginning.” Strange how all that fuss about chemical and biological warfare had been forgotten. The “secret” weapons, the gas masks, the anti-anthrax injections, the pills and chemical suits and all the rest have now been erased from the story—because bullets and rocket-propelled grenades are now the real danger to British and American forces in Iraq. Even the “siege of Baghdad”—a city that is 30 miles wide and might need a quarter of a million men to surround it—is fading from the diary. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, according to The New Yorker, interfered with the generals’ plans. This was going to be—I quote Rumsfeld—“war of a kind we have never seen before.”
Sitting in a Baghdad café, listening to the god-awful propaganda rhetoric of the Iraqis but watching the often promiscuous American and British air attacks— targeting an alleged missile battery near a marketplace in a capital city at midday during a sandstorm isgoing to kill civilians—I have a suspicion that this war’s foundations were based not on military planning but on ideology. Long ago, as we knew, the right-wing pro-Israeli lobbyists around Mr. Bush planned the overthrow of Saddam. This would destroy the most powerful Arab state in the Middle East— Israel’s chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, demanded that the war should start even earlier than it did—and allow the map of the region to be changed for ever. Powell stated just this a month ago.
Illusions were given credibility by a superpower moral overdrive. Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project. September 11th (oddly unmentioned now), links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden (unproven), weapons of mass destruction (unfound), human rights abuses (at which we originally connived when Saddam was our friend), and then, finally, the most heroic project of all—the “liberation” of the people of Iraq. Oil was not mentioned, although it is the all-important and dominating factor in this illegitimate conflict. No wonder General Tommy Franks, the American commander, admitted that his first concern, prior to the war, was the “protection” of the southern Iraqi oilfields. So it was to be “liberation” and “democracy.” How boldly we crossed the border. With what lordly aims had we invaded Iraq.
Few Iraqis doubted—even the ministers in Baghdad spoke about this—that the Americans could, ultimately, occupy the country. “They have the force,” I wrote on 2 April, “and they have the weapons to smash their way into every city and impose a curfew and rule the land by martial law. But can they make Iraqis submit to that rule? Unless the masses rise up as Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair hope, this is now a nationalist war against the most obvious kind of imperial power. Without Iraqi support, how can General Franks run a military dictatorship or find Iraqis willing to serve him or run the oil fields? The Americans can win the war. But if their project fails, they will have lost.” I read these words today with some mystification. There they are, printed in The Independent. But I cannot remember writing them. Perhaps the suicide bombing had jogged my reporter’s hand, maybe that rhetoric about “martyrdom.” War produces infinite fatigue. All day we would travel and write and try to stay alive and then at night, curled up in our beds in the Palestine Hotel in the belief—vain as it was to turn out—that this guaranteed our safety, we would lie awake as giant explosions tore across the city. War is also about insomnia.
At last, the Iraqis decide to truck us out of Baghdad. To Mussayib and to Hilla. The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi army is prepared to defend its capital, I wrote in my notebook, should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? Looking back, I wonder if that is why we were taken, to view the earthworks and ditches and gun embrasures that would, in a few days, be abandoned by their defenders.
For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi army deployed like this. The Americans may say they are “degrading” the country’s defences but there was little sign of that here. That a Western journalist could see more of Iraq’s military preparedness than many of the reporters “embedded” with British and American forces said as much for the Iraqi government’s self-confidence as it did for the need of Saddam’s regime to make propaganda against its enemies.
True, there are signs of the Americans and British striking at the Iraqi military. Two gun pits have been turned to ashes by direct air strikes, and a military barracks—empty like all the large installations that were likely to be on the Anglo-American target list—has been pulverised by missiles. A clutch of telephone exchanges in the towns around Hilla have been destroyed; along with the bombing of six communications centres in Baghdad, the country’s phone system appears to have been shut down.
On a rail track further south, a train carrying military transport has been bombed from the air, the detonations blasting two entire armoured vehicles off their flat-bed trucks and hurling them in bits down an embankment. But other APCs, including an old American M-113 vehicle—presumably a captured relic from the Iranian army—remained intact. If that was the extent of the Americans’ success south of Baghdad, there are literally hundreds of military vehicles untouched for 150 kilometres south of the capital, carefully camouflaged to avoid air attack. Like the Serb army in Kosovo, the Iraqis have proved masters of concealment. An innocent wheat field fringed by tall palm trees turned out, on closer scrutiny, to be traversed with bunkers and hidden anti-aircraft guns. Vehicles were hidden under motorway bridges—which the Americans and British very definitely do not wish to destroy because they want to use them if they succeed in occupying Iraq—and fuel trucks dug in behind deep earth revetments. At a major traffic intersection, an anti-aircraft gun was mounted on a flat-bed truck and manned by two soldiers scanning the pale blue early summer skies.
As well they might. Contrails hung across the skies between Baghdad, Kerbala and Hilla. Above the centre of Hilla, home to the ancient Sumerian Babylon, a distant American AWACS plane could be seen circling high in the heavens, a tiny white dot indicating the giant scanner above the aircraft, its path followed by the eyes of scores of militiamen and soldiers. Driving the long highway south by bus, I could see troops pointing skywards. If hanging concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully, fear of an air strike has almost the same effect. An Iraqi journalist beside me insisted that an American or British aircraft whose course we had been fearfully tracking from our vehicle was turning back towards the south, ignoring traffic on the main road. A few minutes later, it reappeared in front of us, flying in the opposite direction.
Driving the highway south, a lot of illusions are blown from the mind. There are markets in the small towns en route to Babylon, stalls with heaps of oranges and apples and vegetables. The roads are crowded with buses, trucks and private cars—far outnumbering the military traffic, the truckloads of troops and, just occasionally, the sleek outline of a missile transporter with canvas covers wrapped tightly over the truck it is hauling. In the town of Iskandariyah, cafés and restaurants were open, shops were selling take-awaykofta meat balls and potatoes and the tall new television aerials that Iraqis now need to watch their state television channel, whose own transmitters have been so constantly attacked by American and British aircraft. This was not a population on the edge of starvation; nor indeed did it appear to be a frightened people. If the Americans were about to launch an assault through this farmland of canals and massive forests of palm trees and wheat fields, it looked at first glance like a country at peace.
But the large factories and government institutions seemed deserted, many of the industrial workers and employees standing outside the main gates. Only 30 kilometres south of Baghdad, there came the thump of bombs and our bus shook with the impact of anti-aircraft rounds. A series of artillery pieces to our right were firing at an elevation over our heads, the gun muzzles blossoming gold, the shells exploding above the canopy of grey smoke from Baghdad’s oil fires which now spread 80 kilometres south of the city.
The images sometimes stretched the limits of comprehension. Children jumping over a farm wall beside a concealed military radio shack; herds of big-humped camels moving like biblical animals past a Soviet-made T-82 battle tank hidden under palm branches; fields of yellow flowers beside fuel bowsers and soldiers standing amid brick kilns; an incoming American missile explosion that scarcely prompts the farmers to turn their heads. On one pile of rubble north of Hilla someone had fixed the red, white and black flag of Iraq, just as the Palestinians tie their banners to the wreckage of their buildings after Israeli attacks.
Was there a lesson in all this? I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway—you can feel the temperature rise as you drive south—with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations. The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black kuffiah scarves round their heads, whom I saw 150 kilometres south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a “degraded” army on the verge of surrender.
All this, I wrote that night, may be an illusion. The combat troops I saw may have no heart for battle. The tanks may be abandoned when the Americans come down the highway towards Baghdad. The fuel bowsers may be towed back to the capital and the slit trenches deserted. Saddam may flee Baghdad when the first American and British shells come hissing into the suburbs and the statues of the Great Leader that stand outside so many villages along the highway may be ritually sundered. This would prove to be very much the case. But it didn’t feel that way in early April. It looked like an Iraqi army and a Baath party militia that were prepared to fight for their leadership, just as they had at Um Qasr and in Basra and Nasiriyah and Suq al-Shuyukh. Or was it something else they might be fighting for? An Iraq, however dictatorial in its leadership, that simply rejected the idea of foreign conquerors? Or Iraqis who cared more about Iraq than Saddam and who identified the Americans as their enemies without obeying Saddam’s orders?
THE WOUNDS ARE VICIOUS AND DEEP, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hilla teaching hospital some 50 kilometres south of Baghdad are proof that something illegal—something quite outside the Geneva Conventions—occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon. The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the ten patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell “like grapes” from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say—and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare on 29, 30 and 31 March? The sixty-one dead who have passed through the Hilla hospital cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets that explode in the air, or swoop through windows and doorways to burst indoors, or skip off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10:30 that Sunday morning, when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard “the voice of explosions” and looked out of the door to see “the sky raining fire.” She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of “little boxes” that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like “small grapefruit,” he said. “If it hadn’t exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately. They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded.”
Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them—perhaps the metal “butterfly” which contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and which springs open to release them in showers above the ground. Some died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel-house mortuary at the back of the Hilla hospital. The teaching college had received more than 200 wounded since the night of Saturday, 29 March—the sixty-one dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages—and of these doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians.
Soldiers there certainly were, at least forty if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile-launcher was positioned in a nearby field—as they were along the highway north to Baghdad yesterday? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages—even if aimed at military targets—thus transgresses international law.
So it was that twenty-seven-year-old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And so Zaman Abbais, five years old, was hit in the legs and forty-eight-year-old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a thirty-two-year-old soldier, said that the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them. “It is like a grenade and they came into the houses,” he said. “Some stayed on the land, others exploded.”
Heartbreaking is the only word to describe ten-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself, and wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn’t realise that Hoda, standing by her sister’s bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the younger girl’s scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters in a pool of blood near the door. The girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience.
The Iraqi authorities, of course, were all too ready to allow us journalists access to these patients. But there was no way these children and their often uneducated parents could manufacture these stories of tragedy and pain. Nor could the Iraqis have faked the scene in Nadr village where the remains of the tiny bomblets littered the ground beside the scorch marks of the explosions, as well as the shreds of the tiny parachutes upon which the bomb clusters float to the ground once their containers have broken open. A crew from Sky Television even managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from Nadr with them, the wicked metal balls that are intended to puncture the human body still locked into their frame like cough sweets in a metal sheath. They were of a black colour which glinted silver when held against the light.
The deputy administrator of the Hilla hospital and one of his doctors told a confused tale of military action around the city in recent days, of Apache helicopters that would disgorge Special Forces troops on the road to Kerbala. One of their operations—if the hospital personnel are to be believed—went spectacularly wrong one night when militiamen forced them to retreat. Shortly afterwards, the cluster-bomb raids began—artillery rather than aircraft might have been used to deliver the bomblets—although the villages that were targeted appear to have been on the other side of Hilla to the abortive American attack. The most recent raid occurred on Tuesday, when eleven civilians were killed—two women and three children among them—in a village called Hindiyeh. A man sent to collect the corpses reported to the hospital that the only living thing he found in the area of the bodies was a hen. Not till four days later were Iraqi bomb disposal officers ordered into the villages to clear the unexploded ordnance.
Needless to say, it was not the first time that cluster bombs had been used against civilians. During Israel’s 1982 siege of West Beirut, its air force dropped cluster bomblets manufactured for the U.S. Navy across several areas of the city, especially in the Fakhani and Ouzai districts, causing civilians ferocious and deep wounds identical to those I saw in Hilla. Vexed at the misuse of their weapons, which are designed for use against exclusively military targets, the Reagan administration withheld a shipment of fighter-bombers for Israel—then relented a few weeks later and sent the aircraft anyway. Nor is it easy to listen to Iraqi officials condemning the use of illegal weapons by the USAF and RAF when the Iraqi air force itself dropped poison gas on the Iranian army and on pro-Iranian Kurdish villages during the 1980–88 war against Iran. Outraged claims from Iraqi officials at the abuse of human rights by American and British invaders sound like a bell with a very hollow ring. But something grievous happened around Hilla at the end of March, something unforgivable, and contrary to international law.
CONCEIT RULED BAGHDAD. Information Minister Sahaf promised that the Americans would perish like snakes in the desert—even as those same Americans were massed on the outskirts of Baghdad. Almost encircled by his enemies, Saddam now appeared on state television to urge Iraqis to fight to the death against the Anglo-American invasion force, because “victory is in reach.” He appeared in military uniform and black beret beside an Iraqi flag with a white cloth as background. Accusing the Americans of fighting by stealth, he told Iraqis they could fight with “whatever weapons they have.” The enemy, he said, “is trying in vain to undermine our heroic resistance by bypassing the defences of our armed forces around Baghdad. The enemy avoids fighting our forces when they find out that our troops are steadfast and strong. Instead, the enemy drops some troops here and there in small numbers, as we had expected. You can fight these soldiers with whatever weapons you have.” The phrase “as we expected” suggested that the Iraqis had in fact been taken by surprise by the mobility of the American tactics which had, in effect, erased the very notion of the “front line” upon which Iraqi troops were traditionally taught to fight. “Remember that brave old farmer who shot an Apache helicopter with his rifle,” Saddam remarked. The chopper had been brought down on 24 March, and conspiracy theorists immediately suggested that the president’s television address might have been recorded more than a week ago in anticipation of a siege of Baghdad. They need not have bothered. In the last days of his rule, Saddam had become the repository of his own myth, a man who—even as Bush threatened him with war—had preferred to write romantic novels in his palaces.
And now his soldiers—and the civilians of Iraq—were paying the price. I ventured out on 5 April, in a fast car with a government driver who had already been “bought” by The Independent and was now loyal to Fisk rather than Saddam. It was just as well. We drove at speed towards the airport, then turned back towards the city as we heard the power-diving of jets. These were glimpses of fear and death, mere sketches to take back with me to fill out the front page of our Sunday on this last weekend of the invasion. Beside the highway, a squad of troops was stacking grenades as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of U.S. air strikes. The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq’s last front line. An Iraqi armoured vehicle was still smouldering, a cloud of blue-grey smoke rising above the plane trees under which its crew had been sheltering. Two trucks were burnt out on the other side of the road. The American Apache helicopters had left just a few minutes before we arrived. A squad of soldiers, flat on their stomachs, were setting up an anti-armour weapon on the weed-strewn pavement, aiming at the empty airport motorway for the first American tanks to come thrashing down the highway.
A truck crammed with more than a hundred Iraqi troops, many in blue uniforms, all of them carrying rifles that gleamed in the morning sunlight, sped past me towards the airport. A few made victory signs in the direction of my car—my driver was touching 145 kilometres an hour on the speedometer—but of course one had to ask what their hearts were telling them. “Up the line to death” was the phrase that came to mind. Two miles away, at the Yarmouk hospital, the surgeons stood in the car park in bloodstained overalls; they had already handled their first intake of military casualties.
A few hours later, an Iraqi minister was to tell the world that the Republican Guard had just retaken the airport from the Americans, that they were under fire but had won “a great victory.” Around Qadisiya it didn’t look that way. Tank crews were gunning their T-72s down the highway past the main Baghdad railway yards in a convoy of armoured personnel carriers and jeeps and clouds of thick blue exhaust fumes. The more modern T-82s, the last of the Soviet-made fleet of battle tanks, sat hull-down around Jordan Square with a clutch of armoured vehicles. Across vast fields of sand and dirt and palm groves, I saw batteries of Sam-6 anti-aircraft missiles and multiple Katyusha rocket-launchers awaiting the American advance. The soldiers around them looked relaxed, some smoking cigarettes in the shade of the palm trees or sipping fruit juice brought to them by the residents of Qadisiya whose homes—heaven help them—were now in the firing line.
But then a white-painted Japanese pick-up truck pulled out in front of our car. At first, I thought the soldiers on the back were sleeping, covered in blankets to keep them warm. Yet I had opened my car window to keep cool this early summer morning and I realised that all the soldiers—there must have been fifteen of them in the little truck—were lying on top of each other, all with their heavy black military boots dangling over the tailboard. The two living soldiers on the vehicles sat with their feet wedged between the corpses. So did America’s first victims of the day go to their eternal rest.
DAWN ON 6 APRIL started with a series of massive vibrations, a great “stomping” sound that physically shook my room. Stomp, Stomp, Stomp, it went. I lay in bed trying to fathom the cause. It was like the moment in Jurassic Park when the tourists first hear the footfalls of the tyrannosaur, an ever-increasing, ever more frightening thunder of regular, monstrous heartbeats. From my window on the east bank of the Tigris, I saw an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun firing from the roof of a white four-storey building half a mile away, shooting straight across the river at something on the opposite bank. Stomp, Stomp, it went again, the sound so enormous that it set off the burglar alarms in a thousand cars along the riverbank.
And it was only when I stood on the roadway a few minutes later that I knew what had happened. Not since the last Gulf War in 1991 had I heard the sound of American artillery fire. And there, only a few hundred metres away on the far bank of the Tigris, I saw them. At first they looked like tiny armoured centipedes, stopping and starting, dappled brown and grey, weird little creatures that had come to inspect an alien land and search for water.
You had to keep your eye on the centipedes to interpret reality, to realise that each creature was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, that its tail was a cluster of U.S. Marines hiding for cover behind the armour, moving forward together each time their protection revved its engines and manoeuvred closer to the Tigris. There was a burst of gunfire from the Americans, a smart clatter of rocket-propelled grenades and puffs of white smoke from the Iraqi soldiers and militiamen dug into their foxholes and trenches on the same riverbank further south. It was that quick and that simple and that awesome.
Indeed, the sight was so extraordinary, so unexpected—despite all the Pentagon boasts and Bush promises—that one somehow forgot the precedents that it was setting for the future history of the Middle East. Amid the crack of gunfire, the tracer streaking across the river and the huge oil fires that the Iraqis lit to give them cover to retreat, one had to look away—to the great river bridges farther north, into the pale green waters of that most ancient of rivers—to realise that a Western army on a moral crusade had broken through to the heart of an Arab city for the first time since Maude marched into this same city of Baghdad in 1917 and Allenby into Jerusalem in 1918. But Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot, in reverence for Christ’s birthplace, and yesterday’s American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour about it.
The marines and Special Forces who spread out along the west bank of the river broke into Saddam Hussein’s largest palace, filmed its lavatories and bathrooms and lay resting on its lawns before moving down towards the Rashid Hotel and sniping at both soldiers and civilians. Hundreds of Iraqi men, women and children were brought in agony to Baghdad’s hospitals in the hours that followed, victims of bullets, shrapnel and cluster bombs. We could see the twin-engined American A-10s firing their depleted-uranium rounds into the far shore of the river.
From the eastern bank, I watched the marines run towards a ditch with rifles to their shoulders to search for Iraqi troops. But their enemies went on firing from the mudflats to the south until, one after another, I saw them running for their lives. The Iraqis clambered out of their foxholes amid the American shellfire and began an Olympics of terror along the waterside; most kept their weapons, some fell back to an exhausted walk, others splashed right into the waters of the Tigris, up to their knees, even their necks. Three soldiers climbed from a trench with their hands in the air, in front of a group of marines. But others fought on. The Stomp, Stomp, Stomp of the American guns went on for more than an hour. Then the A-10s came back, and an F-18 fighter-bomber that sent a ripple of fire along the trenches, after which the shooting died away.
It seemed as if Baghdad would fall within hours. But the day was to be characterised with that most curious of war’s attributes, a crazed mixture of normality, death and high farce. For even as the Americans were fighting their way north up the river and the F-18s were returning to bombard the bank, Sahaf, the Iraqi minister of information, turned up to give a press conference on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, scarcely half a mile from the battle. As shells exploded to his left and the air was shredded by the power-diving American jets, Mohamed Sahaf announced to perhaps a hundred journalists that the whole thing was a propaganda exercise, the Americans were no longer in possession of Baghdad airport, reporters must “check their facts and re-check their facts—that’s all I ask you to do.” Mercifully, the oil fires, bomb explosions and cordite smoke now obscured the western bank of the river so that fact-checking could no longer be accomplished by looking past Sahaf’s shoulder.
What the world wanted to know, of course, was if Baghdad was about to be occupied, whether the Iraqi government would surrender and—the Mother of All Questions—where was Saddam? But Sahaf used his time to condemn Al-Jazeera for its bias towards the United States and to excoriate the Americans for using “the lounges and halls” of Saddam Hussein to make “cheap propaganda.” The Americans “will be buried here,” he shouted above the battle. “Don’t believe these invaders. They will be defeated.” Only a week ago, Sahaf had informed us that the Americans would acquire graves in the desert. Now their place of interment had moved to the city. And the more he spoke, the more we wanted to interrupt Sahaf, to say, “But hang on, Mr. Minister, take a look over your right shoulder.” But of course, there was only smoke over his right shoulder. Why didn’t we all take a drive around town, he suggested.
So I did. The corporation’s double-decker buses were running and, if the shops were shut, stallholders were open, and near Yassir Arafat Street, men had gathered in cheap tea-houses to discuss the war. I went off to buy fruit, and the shopkeeper didn’t stop counting my dinars—all 11,500 of them—when a low-flying American jet crossed the street and dropped its payload 1,000 metres away in an explosion that changed the air pressure in our ears. But every street corner had its clutch of militiamen, and when I reached the side of the Foreign Ministry on the western bank of the river upstream from the marines, an Iraqi artillery crew was firing a 120-mm gun at the Americans from the middle of a dual carriageway, its tongue of fire bright against the grey-black fog that was drifting over Baghdad.
Within an hour and a half, the Americans had moved up the southern waterfront and were in danger of overrunning the old Ministry of Information. Outside the Rashid Hotel, they opened fire on civilians and militiamen alike, blasting a passing motorcyclist onto the road and shooting at a Reuters photographer who escaped with only bullet holes in his car. All across Baghdad, hospitals were inundated with wounded, many of them women and children hit by fragments of cluster bombs. By dusk, the Americans were flying F-18s in close air support to the marines, so confident of their destruction of Iraq’s anti-aircraft gunners that they could clearly be seen cruising the brown and grey skies in pairs over central Baghdad, turning lazily southwards and west while the cross-river shellfire continued.
At mid-afternoon, the Americans had located an ammunition dump on the western bank of the river not far from the presidential palace—one of three they occupied—and blew up the lot in a sheet of flame several hundred feet high. For hours afterwards, shells could be heard whizzing from the conflagration, sometimes exploding in the sky. Even as they did so, the Americans—clearly intending to enrage Saddam and his ministers—transmitted live pictures of their exploration of the Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris, videotape that showed the presidential lavatory seat, Saddam’s marble-walled bathroom and gold-plated taps and chandeliers, and Special Forces soldiers sun-bathing—though there was no sun—on the presidential lawn.
As night fell, I came across a small rampart of concrete at the eastern end of the great Rashid Bridge over the Tigris. Its three Iraqi defenders had propped their Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade launchers neatly in line along the top of the parapet. Hundreds of American tanks and armoured vehicles were pouring towards the Tigris from the south-west of Baghdad and these three Iraqis—two Baathist militiaman and a policeman—were standing there ready to defend the eastern shore from the greatest army ever known to man. That in itself, I thought, said something about both the courage and the hopelessness of the Arabs. The pain was still to come.
IT WAS A SCENE FROM THE CRIMEAN WAR, a hospital of screaming wounded and floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff, it stuck to my shoes, to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency room, it swamped the passageways and the blankets and sheets. The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam’s regime—sometimes still clinging to severed limbs—are the dark side of victory and defeat, final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours, that war is indeed about the total failure of the human spirit.
As I wandered amid the beds and the groaning men and women on them— Dante’s visit to the circles of Hell should have included these visions—the same old questions recurred. Was this for September 11th? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction? In a jammed corridor, I came across a middle-aged man on a soaked hospital trolley. He had a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket, hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor. A little girl lay on a filthy bed, one leg broken, the other so badly gouged out by shrapnel during an American air attack that the only way doctors could prevent her moving it was to tie her foot to a rope weighed down with concrete blocks. Her name was Rawa Sabri.
And as I walked through this place of horror, the American shelling began to bracket the Tigris River outside, bringing back to the wounded the terror of death they had suffered only hours before. The road bridge I had just crossed to reach the hospital came under fire and clouds of cordite smoke drifted over the medical centre. Tremendous explosions shook the wards and corridors as doctors pushed shrieking children away from the windows.
Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old Ottoman empire. But her equivalent is Dr. Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director and chief surgeon, a gently-spoken man who has slept an hour a day for six days and who is trying to save the lives of more than a hundred souls a day with one generator and half his operating theatres out of use—you cannot carry patients in your arms to the sixteenth floor when they are coughing blood. Dr. al-Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe how difficult it is to stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when they have been injured in the thorax, explaining that after four operations to extract metal from the brains of his patients, he is almost too tired to think, let alone in English.
As I leave him, he tells me that he does not know where his family is. “Our house was hit and my neighbours sent a message to tell me they sent them away somewhere. I do not know where. I have two little girls, they are twins, and I told them they must be brave because their father had to work night and day at the hospital and they mustn’t cry because I have to work for humanity. And now I have no idea where they are.” Then Dr. al-Baeri choked on his words and began to cry and could not say goodbye.
There was a man on the second floor with a fearful wound to the neck. It seemed the doctors could not stanch his blood and he was dribbling his life away all over the floor. Something wicked and sharp had cut into his stomach and six inches of bandages could not stop the blood from pumping out of him. His brother stood beside him and raised his hand to me and asked: “Why? Why?” A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had had to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I didn’t have the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl. There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and the hospital corridors echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful; it was followed by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children outside the wards.
Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms, they had brought in three men who had been burned across their faces and arms and chests and legs, naked men with a skin of blood and tissues whom the doctors pasted with white cream, who sat on their beds with their skinless arms held upwards, each beseeching an absent saviour to rescue him from his pain. “No! No! No!” another young man screamed as doctors tried to cut open his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied like a horse. I thought he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and well fed but now he was a child again and he cried “Ummi, Ummi.” Mummy, mummy.
I left this awful hospital to find the American shells falling in the river outside. I noticed, too, some military tents on a small patch of grass near the hospital’s administration building and—God damn it, I said under my breath—an armoured vehicle with a gun mounted on it, hidden under branches and foliage. It was only a few metres inside the hospital grounds. But the hospital was being used to conceal it. And I couldn’t help reminding myself of the name of the hospital. Adnan Khairallah had been Saddam’s minister of defence, a man who allegedly fell out with his leader and died in a helicopter crash whose cause was never explained. Even in the last hours of the Battle of Baghdad, its victims had to lie in a building named in honour of a murdered man.
I AM DRIVING BACK to the Palestine Hotel. The noise of the shelling has receded. There are American tanks on the Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris but there is no fighting here. When we slow to turn into Saadun Street, I hear birds. Then the crack of a cannon and the hiss of a shell and we arrived at the Palestine to see a puff of grey smoke drifting from an upper floor. Sahaf and Naji Sabri are on the lawn below, still holding court, but then from the hotel entrance journalists and staff come shrieking into the dull sunlight carrying a sheet with something heavy inside, the material sopping with blood. Not for the first time that day, the Americans are killing journalists.
That single tank shell, fired at the Palestine, hit the Reuters television bureau, killing one of the agency’s cameramen, father of an eight-year-old son, and wounding four other members of staff along with a cameraman for the Spanish Telé 5 channel. He was to die later. Was it possible to believe this was an accident? This was our first question on that awful day.
These were not, of course, the first journalists to die in the Anglo–American invasion of Iraq. Terry Lloyd of ITN was shot dead by American troops in southern Iraq who apparently mistook his car for an Iraqi vehicle. Most of his crew were still missing. Michael Kelly of The Washington Posttragically drowned in a canal. Two reporters died in Kurdistan. Two journalists—a German and a Spaniard— were killed at a U.S. base on the edge of Baghdad, along with two Americans, when an Iraqi missile exploded among them. Nor could we forget the Iraqi civilians who were being killed and maimed by the hundreds and who—unlike their journalist guests—could not, as I have said before, leave the war and fly home Business Class. So the facts should speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they made it look bad. For a U.S. pilot had already that day killed Al-Jazeera’s reporter and badly wounded his colleague.
The U.S. jet turned to rocket Al-Jazeera’s office on the banks of the Tigris at 7:45 a.m. Their chief correspondent in Baghdad, a Jordanian–Palestinian called Tareq Ayoub, was on the roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting a pitched battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi troops. As Ayoub’s colleague Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards, both men saw the plane fire the rocket as it swooped toward their building, which is close to the Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two American tanks had just appeared. “On the screen, there was this battle and we could see bullets flying and then we heard the aircraft,” Maher Abdullah said. “The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof—that’s how close it was. We actually heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit—the missile actually exploded against our electrical generator. Tareq died almost at once. Zuheir was injured.”
Now for America’s problems in explaining this little saga. Back in 2001, the United States fired a cruise missile at Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul—from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast around the world. No explanation was ever given for this extraordinary attack on the night before the city’s “liberation”; the Kabul correspondent, Taiseer Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of journalism, Alouni was in the Baghdad office to endure the USAF’s second attack on Al-Jazeera. Far more disturbing, however, was the fact that the Al-Jazeera network—the freest Arab television station, which had incurred the fury of not just the Americans but, as we have seen, Saddam, for its live coverage of the war—gave the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad office in February and received its assurances that the bureau in Iraq would not be attacked. Then on 6 April a State Department spokesman visited Al-Jazeera’s offices in Doha and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite channel, repeated the Pentagon’s assurances. Within twenty-four hours, the Americans had fired their missile into the Baghdad office.
The next assault—on Reuters—came just before midday after the Abrams tank on the Jumhuriya Bridge pointed its gun barrel towards the Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists were staying. Sky Television’s David Chater noticed the barrel moving. The French television channel France 3 actually had a crew in a room below Reuters and videotaped the tank on the bridge. After a long period of silence on the sound track, their tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the tank’s barrel, the sound of a massive detonation and then pieces of paint-work falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact.
In the Reuters bureau on the fifteenth floor, the shell exploded among the staff. It mortally wounded their Ukrainian cameraman Taras “Sasha” Protsjuk— who was also filming the tanks—seriously wounded another member of the staff, Briton Paul Pasquale, and two other journalists, including Reuters’ Lebanese–Palestinian reporter Samia Nakhoul. On the next floor, Telé 5’s Spanish cameraman Jose Couso was also badly hurt. Protsjuk died shortly afterwards. His television camera and its “legs” were left in the office, which was swamped with the crew’s blood.
The American response ignored all the evidence. Major General Buford Blount of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division—whose tanks were on the bridge— announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then ceased. But I had been driving on that road between the tank and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired—and heard no small-arms fire. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records utter silence before the tank’s armament is fired. It is my absolute belief that there were no snipers in the building. Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there—myself included—watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men should ever use the hotel as an assault point. This is, one should add, the same General Blount who boasted back in March that his crews would be using depleted-uranium munitions—the kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion of cancers after the 1991 Gulf War—in their tanks. For General Blount to suggest—as he clearly did by saying that the sniper fire stopped once the Reuters camera crew were hit—that the crew were in some way involved in shooting at Americans merely turned an unbelievable statement into a libellous one.
Again, we should remember that three dead and five wounded journalists do not constitute a massacre—or even the equivalent of the hundreds of civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And it was a truth that needed to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has killed a few journalists of its own over the years, along with tens of thousands of its own people. The name of Farzad Bazoft came to mind. But something very dangerous appeared to be getting loose. Blount’s explanation was the kind employed by the Israelis after they have killed the innocent. Was there therefore some message that we reporters were supposed to learn from all this? Was there some element in the American military that had come to hate the press and wanted to take out journalists based in Baghdad, to hurt those whom Britain’s home secretary, David Blunkett, had claimed to be working behind enemy lines? Could it be that this claim—that international correspondents were in effect collaborating with Mr. Blunkett’s enemy (most Britons having never supported this war in the first place)—was turning into some kind of a death sentence?
I knew Tareq Ayoub. I broadcast to Doha during the war from the same Baghdad rooftop on which he died. I told Ayoub then how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage—seen across the entire Arab world—of the civilian victims of the Anglo–American bombing. Sasha Protsjuk of Reuters often shared the Palestine Hotel’s insupportably slow elevator with me. Samia Nakhoul had been a friend and colleague since the 1975–90 Lebanese civil war. She is married to theFinancial Times’s correspondent David Gardner. And now she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad hospital. And Major General Buford Blount dared to imply that this innocent woman and her brave colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, did this tell us about the war in Iraq?202
Earlier, the U.S. Air Force bombed a civilian housing complex in the Mansour district of Baghdad because American intelligence officers believed Saddam was staying there. Their four 2,000-pound bombs dismembered thirteen Iraqi civilians—by chance, they were mostly Christians—but Saddam was not there. Days later, a fourteenth Iraqi—a baby—would be discovered under the pile of rubble thrown up by the bombs. From Qatar, the BBC reported that U.S. intelligence knew it was not a “risk-free” operation. No risk to the Americans, mark you, only a risk that Iraqi civilians would die for nothing—which they did—and there was, as expected, no apology.
Yet still civilians were being cut down. America’s “probing” raids, their advance up one street, their retreat down another—always covered by the massive use of firepower—were cutting down the innocent in a way that, so we all thought, must have its effect on the post-invasion psychology of the Iraqis. Could all this be forgiven in the name of “liberation”?
We always went to the hospitals. They lay in lines, the car salesman who’d just lost his eye but whose feet were still dribbling blood, the motorcyclist who was hit by bullets from American troops near the Rashid Hotel, the fifty-year-old female civil servant, her long dark hair spread over the towel she was lying on, her body pockmarked with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb. For the civilians of Baghdad, this was the direct result of America’s “probing missions” into Baghdad. It looked very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit to the presidential palace, the videotape of Saddam’s golden loo. But the innocent were bleeding and screaming with pain to bring us our exciting television pictures and to provide Bush and Blair with their boastful talk of victory. I saw one boy in the Kindi Hospital, his mother and father and three brothers all shot dead when they approached an American checkpoint outside Baghdad. I watched two-and-a-half-year-old Ali Najour lying in agony on the bed, his clothes soaked with blood, a tube through his nose, until a relative walked up to me. “I want to talk to you,” he shouted, his voice rising in fury. “Why do you British want to kill this little boy? Why do you even want to look at him? You did this—you did it!” The young man seized my arm, shaking it violently. “Are you going to make his mother and father come back? Can you bring them back to life for him? Get out! Get out!”
In the yard outside, where the ambulance drivers deposit the dead, a middle-aged Shiite woman in black was thumping her fists against her breasts and shrieking at me. “Help me,” she cried. “Help me. My son is a martyr and all I want is a banner to cover him. I want a flag, an Iraqi flag, to put over his body. Dear God, help me!” It’s becoming harder and harder to visit these places of pain and grief and anger. And I’m not surprised. The International Red Cross is reporting civilian victims of America’s three-day offensive against Baghdad arriving at the hospitals now by the hundreds. The Kindi alone had taken fifty civilian wounded and three dead in the previous twenty-four hours. Most of the dead—the little boy’s family, the family of six torn to pieces by an aerial bomb in front of Ali Abdulrazek, the car salesman, the next-door neighbours of Safa Karim—were simply buried within hours of their being torn to bits. There was no point in bringing corpses to a hospital.
On television, it looked so clean. On the previous Sunday evening the BBC showed burning civilian cars, its reporter—my old friend and colleague Gavin Hewitt, with whom I had travelled across Afghanistan almost a quarter of a century ago but now “embedded” with American forces—saying that he saw some of their passengers lying dead beside their vehicles. That was all. No pictures of the charred corpses, no close-ups of the shrivelled children. So perhaps there should be another warning here for those of a “nervous” disposition. Read no further unless you want to know what America and Britain did to the innocents of Baghdad.
I’ll leave out the description of the flies that have been clustering round the wounds in the Kindi emergency rooms, of the blood caked on the sheets and the dirty pillow cases, the streaks of blood on the floor, the blood still dripping from the wounds of those I talked to. All were civilians. All wanted to know why they had to suffer. All—save for the incandescent youth who ordered me to leave the little boy’s bed—talked gently and quietly about their pain. No Iraqi government bus took me to the Kindi Hospital. No doctor knew I was coming.
Let’s start with Ali Abdulrazek. He’s forty years old, the car salesman who was walking yesterday morning through a narrow street in the Shaab district of Baghdad—that’s where the two American missiles killed twenty-one civilians in Abu Taleb Street—when he heard the jet engines of an aircraft. “I was going to see my family because the phone exchanges have been bombed and I wanted to make sure they were OK,” he said. “There was a family, a husband and wife and kids, in front of me. Then I heard this terrible noise and there was a light and I knew something had happened to me. I went to try to help the family in front of me but they were all gone, in pieces. Then I realised I couldn’t see properly.”
Over Abdulrazek’s left eye is a wad of thick bandages, tied to his face. His doctor, Osama al-Rahimi, tells me “we did not operate on the eye, we have taken care of his other wounds.” Then he leans towards my ear and says softly: “He has lost his eye. There was nothing we could do. It was taken out of his head by the shrapnel.” Abdulrazek smiles—of course, he does not know that he will be for ever half-blind—and suddenly breaks into near-perfect English, a language he learned at high school in Baghdad. “Why did this happen to me?” he asks.
Mohamed Abdullah Alwani was a victim of America’s little excursion to the banks of the Tigris, the operation that provided such exciting television footage. He was travelling home on his motorcycle from the Rashid Hotel on the western side of the Tigris when he passed a road in which an American armoured vehicle was parked. “I only saw the Americans at the last moment. They opened fire and hit me and I managed to stay on the cycle. Then their second shell sent bits of shrapnel into the bike and I fell off.” Dr. al-Rahimi peels the bandage back from Alwani’s side. Next to his liver is a vicious, bloody, weeping gash, perhaps half an inch deep. Blood is still running down his legs and off his toes. “Why do they shoot civilians?” he asked me. Yes, I know the lines. Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than us if we hadn’t invaded—not a very smart argument in the Kindi Hospital—and we’re doing all this for Alwani and his friends. Didn’t Paul Wolfowitz tell us all a couple of weeks ago that he was praying for both the American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren’t we coming here to save them—let’s not mention the oil—and isn’t Saddam a cruel and brutal man? But amid these people, you’d have to have a sick mind to utter such words.
Saadia Hussein al-Shomari is pin-cushioned with bloody holes. She is a civil servant from the Iraqi Ministry of Trade and she lies asleep, exhausted by pain, another doctor swiping the flies off her wounds with a piece of cardboard, asking me—as if I knew—whether a human can recover from a severe wound to the liver. A relative tells slowly how Saadia was leaving her home in the Baghdad Jdeidi district when an American plane dropped a cluster bomb on the estate. “There were some neighbours of hers. They were all hit. From one of them, a leg flew off, from another, an arm and a leg went flying into the air.”
Then there was Safa Karim, eleven years old and dying. An American bomb fragment struck her in the stomach and she is bleeding internally, writhing on the bed with a massive bandage on her stomach and a tube down her nose and—somehow most terrible of all—a series of four cheap and dirty scarves that tie each of her wrists and ankles to the bed. She moans and thrashes where she lies, fighting pain and imprisonment at the same time. A relative—her black-shrouded mother sits by the bed in silence—says that she is too ill to understand her fate. “She has been given ten bottles of drugs and she has vomited them all up,” he says. Through the mask that the drip tube makes of her face, Safa moves her eyes toward her mother, then the doctor, then the journalist, then back to her mother.
The man opens the palms of his hands, the way Arabs do when they want to express impotence. “What can we do?” they always say, but the man is silent, and I’m glad. How, after all, could I ever tell him that Safa Karim must die for September 11th, for George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s religious certainty, Paul Wolfowitz’s dreams of “liberation,” and for the “democracy” that we are blasting these people’s lives to create?
BUT THE DAY MUST DAWN. It is 9 April and the Americans have “liberated” Baghdad. They have destroyed the centre of Saddam Hussein’s quarter-century of brutal dictatorial power but brought behind them an army of looters who have unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy. It was a day that had begun with shellfire and blood-spattered hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator’s statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for twenty-five years, had grovelled to Saddam’s most humble secret policemen turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground.
“It is the beginning of our new freedom,” an Iraqi shopkeeper shouted at me. Then he paused, and asked: “What do the Americans want from us now?” The great Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote that he pitied the nation that welcomed its tyrants with trumpetings and dismissed them with hootings of derision. And now the people of Baghdad performed this same deadly ritual, forgetting that they—or their parents—had behaved in identical fashion when the Arab Socialist Baath party destroyed the previous dictatorship of Iraq’s generals and princes. Forgetting, too, that the “liberators” were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion in common with Iraq.
When tens of thousands of Shia Muslim poor from the vast slums of Saddam City poured into the centre of Baghdad to smash their way into shops, offices and government ministries—an epic version of the orgy of theft and mass destruction that the British did so little to prevent in Basra two weeks earlier—U.S. Marines watched from only a few hundred yards away as looters made off with cars, rugs, hoards of money, computers, desks, sofas, even door-frames.
In Fardus Square, U.S. Marines pulled down the gaunt and massive statue of Saddam by roping it to an armoured personnel carrier. It toppled menacingly forward from its plinth to hang lengthways above the ground, right arm still raised in fraternal greetings to the Iraqi people. It was a symbolic moment in more ways than one. I stood behind the first man to seize a hatchet and smash at the imposing grey marble plinth, but within seconds, the marble had fallen away to reveal a foundation of cheap bricks and badly cracked cement. That’s what the Americans always guessed Saddam’s regime was made of, although they did their best—in the late Seventies and early Eighties—to arm him and service his economy and offer him political support, to turn him into the very dictator he became.
In one sense, therefore, America—occupying the capital of an Arab nation for the first time in its history—was helping to destroy what it had spent so much time and money creating. Saddam had been “our” man and now we were annihilating him. Hence the importance of all those statue-bashing mobs, all that looting and theft. At Fardus Square I had seen a small group of young men arriving with a rope and pick-axes. They came as one, not spontaneously, and I have often wondered who organised their little melodrama. But they could not pull the statue down. As so often, the Arabs needed American help. So the marines obliged and it was left to the United States to tear down the dictator’s likeness. A hundred cameras whirred and whined and sucked in this fraudulent scene for posterity. The Iraqi people tear down the image of their oppressor. Only they didn’t. The Americans destroyed the statue of Saddam in front of those too impotent to do the job themselves.
The man’s rule, of course, was effectively over. The torture chambers and the prisons, I wrote in my paper that night, should now be turned into memorials, the true story of Iraq’s use of gas warfare revealed at last. “But history suggests otherwise. Prisons usually pass over to new management, torture cells too . . . And indeed they did.”
Not that the nightmare was over. For though the Americans would mark 9 April as their first day of occupation—they would call it “liberation”—vast areas of Baghdad still remained outside the control of the United States. Just before darkness curled over the land, I crossed through the American lines, back to the little bit of Saddam’s regime that remained intact within the vast, flat city of Baghdad. Down grey, carless streets, I drove to the great bridges over the Tigris that the Americans had still not crossed from the west. And there, on the corner of Bab al-Moazzam Street, was a small group of mujahedin fighters, firing Kalashnikov rifles at the American tanks on the other side of the waterway. It was brave and utterly pathetic and painfully instructive.
For the men turned out to be Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Not an Iraqi was among them. The Baathist militiamen, the Republican Guard, the greasy Iraqi intelligence men, the so-called Saddam Fedayeen, had all left their posts and crept home. Only the foreign Arabs, like the Frenchmen of the Nazi Charlemagne Division in 1945 Berlin, fought on. At the end, many Iraqis had shunned these men; a group of them turned up to sit outside the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, pleading to journalists for help in returning home.
“We left our wives and children and came here to die for these people and then they told us to go,” one of them said. But at the end of the Bab al-Moazzam Bridge they fought on into the night, and when I left them I could hear the American jets flying in from the west. Hurtling back through those empty streets, I could hear, too, the American tank fire as it smashed into their building. If there was to be a resistance in the future, here were willing recruits for the insurgency—if they survived.
Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind that spit fire and the “liberating” kind from which smart young soldiers with tanned faces look down with smiles at Iraqis who are obliging enough to wave at them, tanks with cute names stencilled on their gun barrels, names like “Kitten Rescue” and “Nightmare Witness”—this with a human skull painted underneath—and “Pearl.” And there has to be a first soldier—of the occupying or liberating kind—who stands at the very front of the first column of every vast and powerful army. So I walked up to Corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, from Michigan. He hadn’t spoken to his parents for two months, so I called his mother on my satellite phone and from the other side of the world, Mrs. Breeze came on the line and I handed the phone to her son. And this is what the very first American soldier to enter the centre of Baghdad told his family: “Hi you guys. I’m in Baghdad. I’m ringing to say ‘Hi! I love you. I’m doing fine. I love you guys.’ The war will be over in a few days. I’ll see you all soon.”
Yes, I wrote that evening:
They all say the war will be over soon. There would be a homecoming no doubt for Corporal Breeze and I suppose I admired his innocence despite the deadly realities that await America in this dangerous, cruel land. For even as the marine tanks thrashed and ground down the highway, there were men and women who saw them and stood, the women scarved, the men observing the soldiers with the most acute attention, who spoke of their fear for the future, who talked of how Iraq could never be ruled by foreigners.
“You’ll see the celebrations and we will be happy Saddam has gone,” one of them said to me. “But we will then want to rid ourselves of the Americans and we will want to keep our oil and there will be resistance and then they will call us ‘terrorists.’ ” Nor did the Americans look happy “liberators.” They pointed their rifles at the pavements and screamed at motorists to stop—one who did not, an old man in an old car, was shot in the head in front of two French journalists.
Of course, the Americans knew they would get a good press by “liberating” the foreign journalists at the Palestine Hotel. They lay in the long grass of the nearest square and pretended to aim their rifles at the rooftops as cameras hissed at them, and they flew a huge American flag from one of their tanks and grinned at the reporters, not one of whom reminded them that just 24 hours earlier, their army had killed two Western journalists with tank fire in that same hotel and then lied about it.
But it was the looters who marked the day as something sinister rather than joyful. In Saddam City, they had welcomed the Americans with “V” signs and cries of “Up America” and the usual trumpetings, but then they had set off downtown for a more important appointment. At the Ministry of Economy, they stole the entire records of Iraq’s exports and imports on computer discs, with desk-top computers, with armchairs and fridges and paintings. When I tried to enter the building, the looters swore at me. A French reporter had his money and camera seized by the mob.
At the Olympic sports offices, run by Uday Hussein, they did the same, one old man staggering from the building with a massive portrait of Saddam which he proceeded to attack with his fists, another tottering out of the building bearing a vast ornamental Chinese pot. True, these were regime targets. But many of the crowds went for shops, smashing their way into furniture stores and professional offices. They came with trucks and pick-ups and trailers pulled by scruffy, underfed donkeys to carry their loot away. I saw a boy making off with an X-ray machine, a woman with a dentist’s chair. At the Ministry of Oil, the minister’s black Mercedes limousine was discovered by the looters. Unable to find the keys, they tore the car apart, ripping off its doors, tyres and seats, leaving just the carcass and chassis in front of the huge front entrance. At the Palestine Hotel, they smashed Saddam’s portrait on the lobby floor and set light to the hoarding of the same wretched man over the front door. They cried Allahu akbar . . . And there was a message there, too, for the watching Marines if they had understood it.
And so last night, as the explosion of tank shells still crashed over the city, Baghdad lay at the feet of a new master. They have come and gone in the city’s history, Abbasids and Ummayads and Mongols and Turks and British and now the Americans. The United States embassy reopened yesterday and soon, no doubt, when the Iraqis have learned to whom they must now be obedient friends, President Bush will come here and there will be new “friends” of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who “liberated” them, and—equally no doubt—relations with Israel and a real Israeli embassy in Baghdad.
But winning a war is one thing. Succeeding in the ideological and economic project that lies behind this whole war is quite another. The “real” story for America’s mastery over the Arab World starts now.
If 9 April was the day of “liberation,” 10 April was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and threw the ambassador’s desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag—flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section—as a mob of middle-aged men, chadored women and screaming children rifled through the consul’s office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later. At the headquarters of UNICEF, which had been trying to save the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing brand-new photocopiers on top of one another down the stairs and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition across the floors.
The Americans might have thought they had “liberated” Baghdad after the most stage-managed photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima, but the tens of thousands of thieves—they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty—seemed to have a different idea of what “liberation” meant. It also represented a serious breach of the Geneva Conventions. As the occupying power, the United States was responsible for protecting embassies and UN offices in their area of control, but their troops drove past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the front gate. It was a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania which American troops simply ignored. At one intersection of the city, I saw U.S. Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters— two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators— crammed the highway beneath them. Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn’t worth visiting because “we’ve already taken everything.”
Understandably, the poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam’s regime who impoverished and destroyed their lives—sometimes quite literally—for more than two decades. I watched whole families search through the Tigris bank home of Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam’s half-brother and a former interior minister, of a former defence minister, of Saadoun Shakr, one of Saddam’s closest security advisers, of Ali Hassan al-Majid—“Chemical” Ali— and of Abed Hmoud, Saddam’s private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and donkey-drawn carts to make off with the contents of these massive villas.
It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath party members obviously cultivated: cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drink trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy that it took three muscular thieves to carry them, standard lamps concealed inside brass palm trees, inlaid wooden tables, mother-of-pearl chests of drawers and huge American fridges, so many fridges for so much booze to be drunk by so many of Saddam’s acolytes. Outside the gutted home of one former interior minister, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.
City buses passed me driven by leering young men while trucks backed up to living-room windows to load furnishings directly from the rooms. On the Saddam Bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed that he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still lay dead at the wheel. But there seemed to be a kind of looter’s law. Once a thief had placed his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children were employed to unscrew door hinges and—in the UN offices—to remove light fittings. One stood on the ambassador’s desk to take a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.
On the other side of the Saddam Bridge, an even more surreal sight could be observed. A truck loaded down with chairs but with two white hunting dogs—the property of Saddam’s son Qusay—tethered by two white ropes, galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I even caught a glimpse of four of Saddam’s horses—including the white stallion he used in presidential portraits—being loaded onto a trailer. Every government ministry in the city had now been denuded of its files, computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing the “liberation” of this property. One could hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam’s henchmen, but how was the government of America’s so-called “New Iraq” supposed to operate now that the state’s property has been so comprehensively looted?
And what was one to make of the scene on the Hilla road, where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate armed attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad’s bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks—and doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown were just 200 metres from a U.S. Marine checkpoint.
And already America’s army of “liberation” was beginning to look like an army of occupation. The previous morning I had watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Doura, each man ordered by U.S. soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers—in front of other civilians, including women—to prove that they were not suicide bombers. Following a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt—then shot and killed a man who had walked onto his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in his vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place. In the suburb of Doura, the bodies of Iraqi civilians—many of them killed by U.S. troops in a clash with Iraqi forces earlier in the week—still lay rotting in their smouldering cars.
And this was just Day 2 of the “liberation” of Baghdad.
AND SO TO DOURA. Something terrible—how many times have I written those words—happened there, on Highway 8, in the last hours of the “liberation” of Baghdad. Some say a hundred civilians died there. Others believe that only forty or fifty men and women and children were cut to pieces by American tank fire when members of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division’s Task Force 315 were ambushed by the Republican Guard. Many of their corpses lie rotting in their incinerated cars, a young woman, burned naked, slumped face-down over the rear seat on the Hilla flyover bridge next to half of a male corpse which is hanging out of the driver’s door. Blankets cover a pile of dead civilian bodies, including that of a cremated child, a few metres away. A red car, shot in half by an American tank shell, lies on its side with the lower half of a human leg, still in a black shoe, beside the left front wheel.
No one disputes that the American troops were ambushed here—nor that the battle only ended thirty-six hours later. On the flyover I found a dead Iraqi Republican Guard in uniform, his blood drained into the gutter, one foot over the other, shot in the head. A hundred metres away lay a car with an elderly civilian man dead under the chassis. Two fuel trucks—one of them still burning—lay in a field. A burned-out passenger bus stood beside the main motorway. Hundreds of Iraqis stared at the corpses in horror, most of them holding handkerchiefs to their faces and swatting the flies that buzzed between the living and the dead.
Captain Dan Hubbard, commanding the 315th’s Bravo Company whose ten tanks and four Bradley Fighting Vehicles hold the flyover bridge, described to me how his men came under fire “from 360 degrees” with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 rifles at 7 a.m. on the morning of 6 April when civilian traffic was moving along the motorway. “We’re here to fight the Iraqi regime, not the civilians,” he said. “There were cars on the road when we were ambushed and we fired over their heads two or three times to get them to stop. Ninety per cent of the vehicles turned away after a warning shot.” And here the captain paused for a moment. “A lot of things go on in people’s heads at such times,” he said. “A lot of people speed up . . . I had to protect my men. We tried our very best to minimise any kind of injuries and death to civilians . . . I have got to protect my soldiers because we don’t know if it’s a carload of explosives or RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. We’ll have the cars removed. The bodies will be taken care of.”
Captain Hubbard was a thoughtful man, a thirty-four-year-old from Tennessee who named his tank “Rhonda Denise” after his wife who is “the toughest woman I’ve ever met”—though what she would make of the civilian horror on Highway 8 doesn’t bear thinking about. Hubbard’s M1A1 Abrams tank took five direct hits from RPGs—one on the engine—and it was his tank that opened fire on a motorcycle carrying two soldiers at dusk on the first day of the fighting. “In the morning, I went to look at the bodies. There was the Republican Guard whom you saw, who was hit in the head and chest. But his friend was wounded and still alive—he had survived the whole night on the flyover—so I carried him back to our tank, placed him on top and gave him medical aid. Then we got him to our medics and he survived.” Clearly the Iraqi Republican Guard also have a responsibility for this carnage, since they started their ambush, knowing full well that civilians would be on the motorway.
On the front of the incinerated bus, for example, I found part of a Kalashnikov rifle, its wooden butt in cinders but its ammunition clip still intact. There were crude slit trenches beneath the flyover and the wreckage of a military truck. In all, two American soldiers were killed in the battle and up to thirty wounded. Special Forces were involved in the shooting and six U.S. vehicles destroyed, including two tanks. Captain Hubbard said he had been fired at from a row of civilian houses beside the road and had shot a tank round on to one of the roofs. Its impact was clearly visible.
Many families had come to find their dead relatives and bury them, but I counted at least sixteen civilian bodies—and parts of bodies—still on the highway, several of them women. And of course, this killing field raised a now familiar question. Americans fired tank shells at civilian motorists. Still their bodies lay mouldering beside the road—along with the dead soldier—and still no one had buried them. Sure, the Americans tried not to kill civilians. But all would have been alive today had President Bush not ordered his army to invade their country.203
There would be no inquiry. Nor would there be any inquiry into any of the dreadful events that occurred during the Gone With the Wind epic of looting and anarchy with which the Iraqi population chose to celebrate our gift to them of “liberation” and “democracy.” It started in Basra, with our own shameful British response to the orgy of theft that took hold of the city. The British defence minister, Geoffrey Hoon, made some especially childish remarks about this disgraceful state of affairs, suggesting in the House of Commons that the people of Basra were merely “liberating”—that word again—their property from the Baath party. And the British army enthusiastically endorsed this nonsense. Even as tape of the pillage in Basra was being beamed around the world, there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards cheerfully telling the BBC that “it’s absolutely not my business to get in the way.” But of course it was Colonel Blackman’s business. Pillage merits a specific prevention clause in the Geneva Conventions, just as it did in the 1907 Hague Convention upon which the Geneva delegates based their “rules of war.” “Pillage is prohibited,” the 1949 Geneva Conventions say, and Colonel Blackman and Mr. Hoon should have glanced at Crimes of War, published in 2002 in conjunction with the London City University Journalism Department, to understand what this means.
When an occupying power takes over another country’s territory, it automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its civilians, their property and institutions. Thus the American troops in Nasiriyah became automatically responsible for the driver who was murdered for his car in the first day of that city’s “liberation.” The Americans in Baghdad were responsible for the German and the Slovak embassies that were looted by hundreds of Iraqis, and for the French Cultural Centre that was attacked, and for the Central Bank of Iraq that was torched on 11 April and which, however contaminated it may be by the previous regime— Arab nations tend to deposit their most odious creatures in the role of central bank governor—is the core financial power in Iraq, the new version of Iraq just as much as the old.
But the British and Americans discarded this notion, based though it is upon conventions and international law. And yet again, we journalists allowed them to do so. We clapped our hands like children when the Americans “assisted” the Iraqis in bringing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the television cameras, and yet we went on talking about the “liberation” of Baghdad as if the majority of civilians there were garlanding the soldiers with flowers instead of queuing with anxiety at checkpoints and watching the looting of their capital. We journalists cooperated, too, with a further collapse of morality in this war. Take, for example, the ruthless bombing of the residential Mansour area of Baghdad in the attempt to kill Saddam. The Anglo–American armies claimed they believed Saddam and his two evil sons Qusay and Uday were present. So they bombed the civilians of Mansour and killed at least fourteen decent, innocent people, almost all of them—and this would obviously be of interest to the religious feelings of Messrs. Bush and Blair—Christians.
Now one might have expected the BBC World Service Radio next morning to question whether the bombing of civilians did not constitute a bit of an immoral act, a war crime perhaps, however much we wanted to kill Saddam. Forget it. The presenter in London described the slaughter of these innocent civilians as “a new twist” in the war to target Saddam—as if it was quite in order to kill civilians, knowingly and in cold blood, in order to murder our most hated tyrant. The BBC’s correspondent in Qatar—where the Centcom boys pompously boasted that they had “real-time” intelligence that Saddam was present—used all the usual military jargon to justify the unjustifiable. The “Coalition,” he announced, knew it had “time-sensitive material”—i.e., that they wouldn’t have time to know whether they were killing innocent human beings in the furtherance of their cause or not—and that this “actionable material” (again I quote this revolting BBC dispatch) was not “risk-free.”
And then he went on to describe, without a moment of reflection on the moral issues involved, how the Americans had used their four 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs to level the civilian homes. These were the very same pieces of ordnance that the same U.S. Air Force used in their vain effort to kill Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001. So now we were using them, knowingly, on the flimsy homes of civilians of Baghdad—folk who would otherwise be worthy of the “liberation” we wished to bestow upon them—in the hope that a gamble, a bit of “intelligence” about Saddam, would pay off.204
The Geneva Conventions have a lot to say about all this. They specifically refer to civilians as protected persons, who must have the protection of a warring power even if they find themselves in the presence of armed antagonists. The same protection was demanded for southern Lebanese civilians when Israel launched its brutal “Grapes of Wrath” operation in 1996. When that Israeli pilot, for example, fired his U.S.-made Hellfire missile into the Mansouri ambulance in Lebanon, killing three children and two women, the Israelis claimed that a Hizballah fighter had been in the vehicle. The statement proved to be untrue. But Israel was rightly condemned for killing civilians in the hope of killing an enemy combatant. Now we were doing exactly the same. So no more namby-pamby Western criticism of Israel after the bunker-busters have been dropped on Mansour.
More and more, we were committing these crimes. The mass slaughter of more than 400 civilians in the Amariya air-raid shelter in Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War was carried out in the hope that it would kill Saddam. In the 1999 bombardment of Serbia we repeatedly bombed civilian areas—after realising that the Yugoslav army had abandoned their barracks—and in one of the most vicious incidents towards the end of that war, an American jet bombed a narrow road bridge over a river. NATO said the bridge could carry tanks even if there was no tank on it at the time. In fact, the bridge was far too narrow to carry a tank. But another pilot returned to bomb the bridge again, just as the rescuers were trying to save the wounded. Victims of the second bomb included schoolgirls. Again, we forgot about this in our euphoria at winning the war.
Why? Why cannot we abide by the rules of war that we rightly demand that others should obey? And why do we journalists—yet again, war after war— collude in this immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and illegal act into a “new twist” or into “time-sensitive material”? Wars have a habit of turning normally sane people into cheerleaders, of transforming rational journalists into nasty little puffed-up fantasy colonels. But surely we should all carry the Geneva Conventions into war with us, along with the history books. For the only people to benefit from our own war crimes will be the next generation of Saddam Husseins. Isn’t that what the insurgents were to learn within weeks and months of the occupation?
BUT WE COULD ALWAYS FALL BACK on the argument that would become our sine qua non in the months and years to come, the most quotable quote, the easiest line in the book, the very last resort of the scoundrel in Iraq: Saddam was worse. We weren’t as bad as Saddam. We didn’t kill and torture in the Abu Ghraib prison— these qualifications would be dropped later for obvious reasons—because we were civilised, liberators, democrats who believed in freedom. We were the good guys.
So in those first hours after the “liberation” of Baghdad, I did go and take a peek into the heart of darkness. I waded through the cartridge cases of the Jumhuriya Bridge battle that lay like winter leaves across the highway—the tank whose shell had killed my two colleagues was still there, hatches down—and walked through the great Raj-gate of Saddam’s Presidential Palace. Inside was the holiest of holies, the ark of Saddam’s Baathist covenant, his very own throne. The seat was covered in blue velvet and was soft, comfortable in an upright, sensible sort of way, with big gold arm-rests upon which his hands—for Saddam was obsessed with his hands—could rest, and with no door behind it through which assassins could enter the room. There was no footstool, but the sofas and seats around the vast internal conference chamber of Saddam’s palace placed every official on a slightly lower level than the caliph himself.
Did I sit on Saddam’s throne? Of course I did. There is something dark in all our souls which demands an understanding of evil rather than good, because—I suppose—we are more fascinated by the machinery of cruelty and power than we are by angels. So I sat on the blue throne and put my hands over the golden arm-rests and surveyed the darkened, gold-glistening chamber in which men of great power sat in terror of the man who used to sit where I was now sitting. “He knew human folly like the back of his hand,” Auden wrote of his eponymous dictator. Ah yes, the hands.
Behind the throne was a vast canvas of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem— minus the Jewish settlements—so that the third-holiest city of Islam hung above the head of the mightiest of Iraqi warriors. And opposite Saddam’s chair—there was no electricity and the room was in darkness and the torchlight that illuminated the opposite canvas could only produce a gasp of astonishment and horrible clarity—was a different work of Baathist art. It depicted a clutch of huge missiles, white-hot flames burning at their tails, soaring towards a cloud-fringed, sinister heaven, each rocket wreathed in an Iraqi flag and the words “God is Great.”
The godly and the ungodly faced each other in this central edifice of Baathist power. The American 3rd Infantry Division who were camped in the marble halls and the servants’ bedrooms had been searching in vain for the underground tunnels that were supposed to link this complex with the bomb-smashed Ministry of Defence next door. They had kept the looters at bay—though I found some of them thieving televisions and computers in the smaller villas of the palace grounds— because, so they said, General Tommy Franks would probably set up his proconsulship here and, if the Americans could create a compliant Iraqi government, a new U.S.-appointed administration might be running the country from this vast pseudo-Sumerian complex within a few months.
They would find Saddam’s swimming pool intact, along with his spacious palm groves and rose gardens. Indeed—how often are brutal men surrounded by beauty—the scent of roses drifted even now through the colossal marble halls and chambers and underground corridors of the Republican Palace. There were peonies and nasturtiums and the roses were red and pink and white and crimson and covered in white butterflies, and water—though the 3rd Infantry Division had not yet found the pumps—gurgled from taps into the flower beds. There was even a miniature zoo with a cuddly old bear and lion cubs to which the Americans were feeding a live sheep per day. In Saddam’s pool-side washing room, piles of books had been tied up for removal—Iraqi poetry and, would you believe it, volumes of Islamic jurisprudence—while exercise machines waited across the floor to keep the second Saladin in moderate physical shape. His sixty-sixth birthday would fall in two weeks’ time. Over the door were the initials “S.H.”
Walking the miles of corridors—after walking the 2-mile road to the palace itself, through yet more fields of roses and palms and piles of spent ammunition and the smell of something awful and dead beyond the flower beds—one was struck by the obsessive mixture of glory and banality. The 15-foot chandeliers inspire admiration, but the solid gold bathroom fittings—the solid gold loo holder and the solid gold loo handle—created a kind of cultural aggression. If one was supposed to be intimidated by Saddam’s power—as the Coliseum and the triumphal arches were meant to impress the people of Rome—what was one to make of the narrow unpolished marble staircases or the great marble walls of the antechamber with their gold-leaf ceilings, walls into which were cut quotations from the interminably dull speeches and thoughts of “His Excellency President Saddam Hussein.”
Fascist is the word that sprang to mind, but fascism with a touch of Don Corleone thrown in. In that great conference room would sit the attendant lords—the senior masters of the Baath party, the security apparatchiks upon whom the regime depended—desperately attempting to keep awake as their leader embarked on his four-hour explanations of the state of the world and of Iraq’s place within it. As he talked of Zionism, they could admire the Al-Aqsa mosque. When he became angry, they could glance at the fiery missiles streaking towards that glowering sky with the clouds hanging oppressively low in the heavens.
His words were even cut into the stonework of the outer palace walls where four 20-foot-high busts of the great warrior Hammurabi, clad in medieval helmet and neck-covering, stare at one another across the courtyard. Hammurabi, however, had a moustache and—amazing to perceive—bore an uncommon likeness to Saddam Hussein. Could the government of the “New Iraq” really hold its cabinet meetings here while these four monsters stared at their American-supplied Mercedes? Answer: no. The statues were removed by crane within six months.
The gold leaf, the marble, the chandeliers, the sheer height and depth of the chambers took the breath away. In one hall, a Pantheon-like dome soared golden above the walls, and when I shouted “Saddam” I listened to the repeated echo of “Saddam” for almost a minute. And I had an absolute conviction that Saddam did just that. If he could instruct his masons to carve his name upon the walls, surely he wanted to hear it repeated in the heights of his palace.
Far below was the Saddam private cinema, with its blue patent leather seats and two rolls of film—one French, one Russian—still waiting for the final picture show. Outside, beyond the great lawns and the fountains, stood the American Abrams tanks of the 3rd Infantry Division, their names containing the banality and power of another nation. On their barrels I could read how the crews had dubbed their armoured behemoths. Atomic Dog. Annihilator. Arsonist. Anthrax. Anguish. Agamemnon . Saddam would have approved.
BAGHDAD WAS BURNING. I counted sixteen columns of smoke rising over the city on the aftenoon of 11 April. At the beginning, there was the Ministry of Trade. I watched the looters throw petrol through the smashed windows of the ground floor and the fire burst from them within two seconds. Then there was a clutch of offices at the bottom of the Jumhuriya Bridge which emitted clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. By mid-afternoon, I was standing outside the Central Bank of Iraq as each window flamed like a candle, a mile-long curtain of ash and burning papers drifting over the Tigris.
As the pickings got smaller, the looters grew tired and—the history of Baghdad insists that anarchy takes this form—the symbols of government power were cremated. The Americans talked of a “new posture” but did nothing. They pushed armoured patrols through the east of the city, Abrams tanks and Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but their soldiers did no more than wave at the arsonists. I found a woman weeping beside her husband in the old Arab market. “We are destroying what we now have for ourselves,” she said to him. “We are destroying our own future.”
The flames spread. By mid-afternoon, the al-Sadeer Hotel was burning—the army of child thieves sent into the building had already stolen the bed-linen and the mattresses, the beds and tables, even the reception desk and its mass of iron keys. Then from the towering Ministry of Industry, a concrete pile of Third Reich conception, came trails of black smoke. Every central street was strewn with papers, discarded furniture, stolen, wrecked cars and the contents of the small shops whose owners had not bothered to buy armoured doors. At last, the banks were also looted. Since the collapse of the Iraqi dinar—it stood at more than 4,000 to the dollar—no one had bothered to bash their way into the banks before. But in the morning, I saw a mob storming the Rafidain Bank near the Baghdad governorate, dragging a massive iron safe to the door and crowbarring it open. Given the worth of the dinar, they would have done better to leave the cash inside and steal the safe.
Iraq’s scavengers thieved and destroyed what they were allowed to loot and burn by the Americans—but a two-hour drive around Baghdad showed clearly what the United States intended to protect, presumably for its own use. After days of arson and pillage, I compiled a short but revealing scorecard. U.S. troops had sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the ministries of Planning, Education, Irrigation, Trade, Industry, Foreign Affairs, Culture and Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq’s history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, nor from looting three hospitals.
However, the Americans put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remained untouched—and untouchable—with tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvee jeeps surrounding both institutions. So which particular ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of the Interior, of course—with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq—and the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraq’s most valuable asset—its oilfields and, even more important, its massive reserves, perhaps the world’s largest—were safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared—as Washington almost certainly intended—with U.S. oil companies.
It cast an interesting reflection on America’s supposed war aims. Anxious to “liberate” Iraq, it allowed its people to destroy the infrastructure of government as well as the private property of Saddam’s henchmen. The Bush administration insisted that the oil ministry was a vital part of Iraq’s inheritance, that the oil fields were to be held in trust “for the Iraqi people.” But was the Ministry of Trade—relit on 14 April by an enterprising arsonist—not vital to the future of the Iraqi people? Were the ministries of Education and Irrigation—still burning fiercely—not of critical importance to the next Iraqi government? The Americans, as we now knew, could spare 2,000 soldiers to protect the Kirkuk oilfields, containing probably the largest reserves in the world, but couldn’t even invest 200 soldiers to protect the Mosul museum from attack.
There was much talk of that “new posture” from the Americans. Armoured and infantry patrols suddenly appeared on the middle-class streets of the capital, ordering young men hauling fridges, furniture and television sets to deposit their loot on the pavement if they could not prove ownership. It was pitiful. After billions of dollars’ worth of government buildings, computers and archives had been destroyed, the Americans were stopping teenagers driving mule-drawn carts loaded with worthless second-hand chairs. There was a special anger now to the crowd that gathered every afternoon opposite the American lines outside the Palestine Hotel. On 12 April, they chanted “Peace-peace-peace—we want a new Iraqi government to give us security.” Two days later, some of them shouted “Bush– Saddam, they are the same.”
But there was worse—far worse—to come. Never, in all my dreams of destruction, could I have imagined the day I would enter the Iraqi National Archaeological Museum to find its treasures defiled. They lay across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq’s history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete floor. My feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history—only to be destroyed when America came to “liberate” the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation’s thousands of years of civilisation.
Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul—perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier—have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces. “This is what our own people did to their history,” the man in the grey gown said as we flicked our torches across the piles of once perfect Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of Iraq’s National Archaeological Museum.
“We need the American soldiers to guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen.” But all the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced on 12 April 2003 were gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighbouring apartment blocks. “Look at this,” he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where the jar—perhaps two feet high in its original form—had been smashed into four pieces. “This was Assyrian.” The Assyrians ruled almost two thousand years before Christ.
And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, that morning they were recruiting Saddam’s hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten’s force in South-East Asia which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Vietnamese cities—bayonets fixed—after the recapture of IndoChina in 1945. A queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling for them to resume their “duties” on the streets. In the late afternoon, at least eight former and very portly senior police officers, all wearing green uniforms—the same colour as the uniforms of the Iraqi Baath party—turned up to offer their services to the Americans, accompanied by a U.S. Marine.
But there was no sign that any of them would be sent down to the Archaeological Museum. There was no electricity in Baghdad—as there was no water and no law and no order—and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and blundering into broken-winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar—“3500 BC,” it said on one shelf corner—had been bashed to pieces. Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose—and less than three months after U.S. archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country’s treasures and put the museum on a military database— did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy so much of the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad. “Stuff happens,” he said. Could there really be so many vases in Iraq?
For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this centre of early civilisation from palaces, ziggurats and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files—often in English and in graceful nineteenth-century handwriting—now lay strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. “Late 2nd century, no. 1680” was written in pencil on the inside. To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures past a generator to cars and trucks.
The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one—not even the museum guard in the grey gown—had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold-leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. In the vast museum library, only a few books—mostly mid-nineteenth-century archaeological works—appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set little value on books. I found a complete set of The Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still intact—lying next to them was a paperback entitled: Baghdad, The City of Peace—but thousands of card-index sheets had been flung from their boxes over stairwells and banisters.
British, French and German archaeologists played a leading role in the discovery of some of Iraq’s finest ancient treasures—that great British Arabist, diplomatic schemer and spy Gertrude Bell, the “uncrowned queen of Iraq,” whose tomb lay not far from the museum, was an enthusiastic supporter of their work. The Germans built the modern-day museum beside the Tigris and only in 2000 was it reopened to the public after nine years of closure following the first Gulf War.
But even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam’s soldiers showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions were still clearly visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull. Only a few weeks before, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities, had referred to the museum’s contents as “the heritage of the nation.” They were, he said, “not just things to see and enjoy—we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq.” Ibrahim had temporarily vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues were now trying to defend what was left of the country’s history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. “We don’t want to have guns—but everyone must have them now,” he said. “We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man—so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?” Half an hour later, I contacted the Civil Affairs unit of the U.S. Marines in Saadoun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that “we’re probably going to get down there.” Too late. Iraq’s history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their “liberation.”
But “liberation” had already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Fardus Square demanding a new Iraqi government “for our protection and security and peace,” U.S. Marines, who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at the ready. The reality, which the Americans—and of course, Mr. Rumsfeld—failed to understand, was that under Saddam, the poor and deprived were always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis—just as Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it was the Sunnis who were now suffering plunder at the hands of the Shia. And so the gun battles that broke out between property-owners and looters were, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. “By failing to end this violence—by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity—the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad,” I wrote that night in The Independent:
I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds of streets are now barricaded off with breeze blocks, burned cars and tree trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who threaten their homes or shops . . . A few Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday—positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted—but fires burned across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The municipality building was blazing away last night and on the horizon other great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air. Too little too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water purification workers turned up at the Marine headquarters, pleading for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves . . . “You are American!” a woman shouted at me in English . . . “Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city.” It was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country—as well as her city—has been destroyed.
And so, on 14 April, it was the burning of books. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives—a priceless treasure of Ottoman documents including the old royal archives of Iraq—were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have been no more than ten years old. Amid the ashes of hundreds of years of Iraqi history, I found just one file blowing in the wind outside: pages and pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sherif Hussein of Mecca—who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia— and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for Ottoman troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all of them in delicate handwritten Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq’s written history. But for Iraq, this was Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Archaeological Museum and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library of the ministry 500 metres away, the cultural identity of Iraq was being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose was this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning—there were flames 30 metres high bursting from the windows—I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs bureau, to report what I had seen. An officer shouted to a colleague that “This guy says some biblical library is on fire.” I gave the map location, the precise name—in Arabic and English—of the building, I said that the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene—and the flames were now shooting 60 metres into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burned libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the caliphate, but even the dark years of the country’s modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, with personal photographs and military diaries, an entire library of Western newspapers—bound volumes of the Financial Times were lying on the pavement opposite the old Defence Ministry—and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s. The microfiche machines were burned too.
Palestinian newspapers from the early years of the PLO—even the journals of the “Kashmir Liberation Cell”—were lying on the floor. But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library opposite the Ministry of Defence, where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was of such strength that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs which I climbed through the acres of smouldering documents had been cracked by the furnace. The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. And again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: Why?
So, as an all too painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople or to the Court of the Sherif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed themselves “your slave.” There was a request to protect a camel convoy of tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request for perfume and a warning from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of the Sherif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. “This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded,” al-Ayashi says. “If you don’t take our advice, then we have warned you.” A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.
Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and artillery for the Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz—soon to be Saudi Arabia—while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his interrogators “with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and later bought off.” There is a nineteenth-century letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, “a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government.”
This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history—all that was left of it, which I picked off the road205—as the mass of documents of centuries still crackled in the immense heat of the ruins of the National Archives. Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca—whose court personnel are the authors of many of the letters I saved—was later deposed by the Saudis. It was his son Feisal who became king of Iraq and Feisal’s brother Abdullah who became the first king of Jordan, the grandfather of King Hussein and the great-grandfather of the present Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah the Second.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan’s grandson burned the city in the thirteenth century and, so it was said, the Tigris ran black with the ink of books. Now the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why? Who sent the looters? Who sent the arsonists? Were they paid? Who wanted to destroy the identity of this country?
America’s project in Iraq was going wrong faster than anyone could have imagined. “The army of ‘liberation’ has already turned into the army of occupation,” I wrote in my paper on 17 April:
. . . Even the individual U.S. Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. “Go away! Get out of my face!” an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. “God is Great! God is Great!” the Iraqi retorted. “Fuck you!”
It is much worse than that. The Americans have now issued a “Message to the Citizens of Baghdad,” a document that is as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone. “Please avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before the call to morning prayers,” it tells the people of the city. “During this time, terrorist forces associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as various criminal elements, are known to move through the area . . . please do not leave your homes during this time. During all hours, please approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution . . .” So now—with neither electricity nor running water—the millions of Iraqis here are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. It’s a form of imprisonment. In their own country.
Written by the commanding officer of the 1st U.S. Marine Division, it’s a curfew in all but name. “If I was an Iraqi and I read that,” an Arab woman shouted at me yesterday, “I would become a suicide bomber.” And all across Baghdad, you hear the same thing, from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come only for oil, and that soon—very soon—a guerrilla resistance must start. No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are “remnants” of Saddam’s regime or “criminal elements.” But that will not be the case.
Marine officers in Baghdad were yesterday holding desperate talks with a Shia militant cleric from Najaf to avert an outbreak of fighting around the holy city—I met the prelate just before the negotiations began. He told me that “history is being repeated.” He was talking about the British invasion of Iraq in 1917, which ended in disaster for the British. To gain entrance to the desert town of al-Anbar, U.S. intelligence officers yesterday had to negotiate with tribal leaders in the best restaurant in Baghdad.
Everywhere are the signs of collapse. And everywhere the signs that America’s promises of “freedom” and “democracy” are not to be honoured . . . Here’s what Baghdadis are noticing—and what Iraqis are noticing in all the major cities of the country. Take the vast security apparatus with which Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy which was its foundation. President Bush promised that America was campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war criminals, would be tracked down and brought to trial. Now the 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are empty; even the three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. I have been to many of them. But not a single British or American officer has visited the sites to sift through the wealth of documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners who are themselves visiting their former places of torment. Is this through idleness. Or is this wilful?
Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the Tigris River. It’s a pleasant villa—once owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was deported to Iran in the 1980s—and there’s a little lawn outside and a shrubbery and at first you don’t notice the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room nor the fact that big sheets of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted over the windows to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the floors, in the garden, on the roof, are the files of this place of suffering. They show, for example, that the head of the torture centre was Hashem al-Tikrit, that his deputy was called Rashid al-Nakib. Ex-prisoner Mohamed Aish Jassem showed me how he was suspended from the ceiling by his torturer, Captain Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of the religious Dawa party.
“They put my hands behind my back like this and tied them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists,” he told me. “They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the ceiling, then they’d release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder when I fell.” The hooks in the ceiling are just in front of Captain al-Isawi’s desk. I understood what this meant. There wasn’t a separate torture chamber and elsewhere an office for documentation. The torture chamber was the office. While the man or woman shrieked in agony above him, Captain al-Isawi would sign papers, take telephone calls and—given the contents of his rubbish bin—smoke many cigarettes while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.
Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are they sought by the Americans? No. Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly— indeed some of them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs unit. The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad—pedestrians were forbidden to walk down the road outside lest they heard the screams—are all named on the documents lying on the floor. They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Mohamed Fayad. But the Americans haven’t bothered to find this out. So Messrs. Alawai, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply for work from the Americans.
There are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the cupboards. What happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud? We shall not know. A lady in a black chador approached the old torture centre. Four of her brothers had been taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened, she was told all four had been executed. She was ordered to leave the building. She never saw or buried their bodies . . . One man told me his brother had been brought to this awful place 22 years ago—and never seen again.
And the men who suffered under Saddam? What did they have to say? “We committed no sin,” one of them said to me, a 40-year-old whose prison duties had included the cleaning of the hangman’s trap of blood and faeces after each execution. “We are not guilty of anything. Why did they do this to us? America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil belongs to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans must go.”
If the Americans and the British want to understand the nature of the religious opposition here, they have only to consult the files of Saddam’s secret service archives. I found one, Report No 7481, dated 24th February this year—for the Iraqi “mukhabarat” security men were still working hard on their Shia enemies less than a month before the American invasion—on the conflict between Sheikh Mohamed al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada Sadr, the 22-year-old grandson of Mohamed Sadr, who was executed on Saddam’s orders more than two decades ago, a dispute which showed both the passion and the determination with which the Shia religious leaders fight even each other. But of course, no-one has bothered to read this material or even look for it.
At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and American intelligence officers moved into the defeated Reich to hoover up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaus across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence that lies everywhere to be read. For there’s an even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad, the headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive grey-painted block that was bombed by the Americans and a series of villas and office buildings which are stashed with files, papers and card indexes.
It was here that Saddam’s special political prisoners were brought for vicious interrogation—electricity being an essential part of this—and it was here that Farzad Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for questioning before his dispatch to the hangman. It’s also graced with delicately shaded laneways, a children’s creche—for the families of the torturers—and a school in which one pupil had written an essay in English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . There’s also a miniature hospital and a road named “Freedom Street” and flower beds and bougainvillea. It’s the creepiest place in all of Iraq. I met—extraordinarily —an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking in fear around the compound, a colleague of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr. Shahristani. “This is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will never return to it,” he said to me. “This was the place of greatest evil in all the world.”
But the Americans should pay a visit. The top security men in Saddam’s regime were busy in the last hours of their rule, shredding millions of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of papers. Shouldn’t they be taken to Washington or London and re-constituted to learn their secrets? That’s what the Iranians did with the shredded U.S. embassy files in Tehran in 1980.
But again, the Americans have not bothered—or do not want—to search through these papers. If they did, they would also find the names of dozens of senior Iraqi intelligence men, many of them identified by the files of congratulatory letters which Saddam’s secret policemen insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted. Where now, for example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, Captain Saad Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohamed, Captain Majid Ahmed and scores of others? We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.
. . . Then there’s the fires that have consumed every one of the city’s ministries—save, of course, for the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil—along with UN offices, embassies and shopping malls. I have counted a total of 35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising. Take the scene played out on Wednesday. I was driving through Baghdad when I saw a vast column of black smoke staining the horizon. So I headed to see which ministry was left to burn. I found myself at the Ministry of Oil, assiduously guarded by U.S. troops, some of whom were holding clothes over their mouths because of the clouds of smoke swirling down on them from the neighbouring Ministry of Agricultural Irrigation. Hard to believe, isn’t it, that they were unaware that someone was setting fire to the next building?
Then I spotted another fire, just lit, three kilometres away. I drove to the scene to find flames curling out of all the windows of the Ministry of Higher Education’s Department of Computer Science. And right next to it, perched on a wall, was a U.S. Marine, who said he was guarding a neighbouring hospital and didn’t know who had lit the next door fire because “you can’t look everywhere at once.” Now I’m sure the marine was not being facetious or dishonest—should the Americans not believe this story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd Regiment, 4th Marines and, yes, I called his fiancée Jessica in the States for him to pass on his love—but something is terribly wrong when American soldiers are ordered to simply watch vast government ministries being burned by mobs and do nothing about it.
Because there is also something very dangerous—and deeply disturbing—about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives. For they are not the looters. The looters come first. The arsonists turn up afterwards, often in blue and white single-decker buses. I actually followed one of them after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town. Now the official American line on all this is that the looting is revenge—an explanation that is growing very thin—and that the fires are started by “remnants of Saddam’s regime,” the same “criminal elements,” no doubt, who feature in the Marines’ curfew orders to the people of Baghdad.
But people in Baghdad don’t believe Saddam’s former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I. True, Saddam might have liked Baghdad to end in Götterdämmerung—and might have been tempted to turn it into a city of fire before the Americans entered. But afterwards? The looters make money from their rampages. But the arsonists don’t make money by burning. They have to be paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn’t have started the fires. The moment Saddam disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the whole project, not wasted their time earning their cash post-payment.
So who are they, this army of arsonists? Again, we don’t know. I recognised one the other day, a middle-aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt— you can’t change clothes too often when you have no water to wash in—and the second time he saw me he pointed a Kalashnikov rifle at me. Looters don’t carry guns. So what was he frightened of? Who was he working for? In whose interest is it—now, after the American occupation of Baghdad—to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, along with its cultural heritage? Why didn’t the Americans stop this?
As I said, something is going terribly wrong here in Baghdad and something is going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States government. Why, for example, did Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld claim last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction in Baghdad? His statement was a lie. But why did he make it? The Americans say they don’t have enough troops to control the fires. This is also untrue. If they don’t, what are the hundreds of troops deployed in the gardens of the old Iran–Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the hundreds camped in the rose gardens of the Presidential Palace near the Jumhuriya Bridge?
So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of their cultural heritage—their very cultural identity—in the looting of the archaeological treasures from the national museum, the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State archives and the Koranic library and the vast infrastructure of the nation we claim we are going to create for them. Why, they ask, do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burned, dehistoried, destroyed? Why are they issued with orders for a curfew of millions of people by their so-called liberators? . . . It’s easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war which lacked all international legimitacy. But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially for those who are false optimists and invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations like weapons of mass destruction which have still been unproved. So I’ll make an awful prediction. That America’s war of “liberation” is over. Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.